


Eat Rotten Fruit from a Shitty Tree

by birdbrains



Series: Eat Rotten Fruit [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: (it's a game not an animal), Bucky thinks Steve is his handler, Consent Issues, Food, Gallows Humor, M/M, Obedience, Paralysis, Past Sexual Assault, Touch-Starved, Trauma, Trauma Chicken, Triggers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-08 16:29:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10391031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/birdbrains/pseuds/birdbrains
Summary: “So first of all I wasn’t aiming for you,” Steve said.“It’s okay if you were,” Bucky said. “I realize I was testing your patience—”“You can’t seriously think it would be okay for me to stab you with a fork,” Steve said.There was a pause and Bucky said, ducking his head a little, “No, I guess not.” Then he looked at Steve and said, “What, you gonna get mad at me again for treating you like Hydra?”





	1. Eat Rotten Fruit from a Shitty Tree

"But we are not homies, I just keep you around  
'Cause all your talking is the noise I need to kill the sound  
Of all these voices telling me no one can help me out”  
—Childish Gambino, "Be Alone"

 

Whenever Bucky and Steve went anywhere, it took five times as long as Steve was used to. Soon Steve picked up a habit of trying to steer them onto less populated routes, because Bucky would talk to almost every person he saw. “What is that? I never saw a dog like that before.” “Nice wheelchair!” “Looks like a comfy sweater.” He’d been that way before the war, and now he was worse. A homeless man had only to glance in their direction and Bucky would immediately produce money—not change but paper money, a one dollar bill or sometimes five.

The third or fourth time this happened, the homeless guy said, “Thanks, man. I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Bucky said, and he meant it. He seemed to love everyone he met. The homeless guy didn’t seem like the type to crave compliments, but people who could take them were fantastic, gorgeous, doing the smartest thing Bucky had ever seen. (“That’s the smartest thing I’ve ever seen,” he told a lady who was filling her purse up with sugar packets at McDonald’s.)

He would tell girls they looked pretty, but somehow they never seemed bothered by the way he did it—it would come off as admiration of their coat or the way they did their hair, nothing pushy. He’d always been good at putting his interest out there, letting it hang in the air for someone to take if they wanted to.

Steve had seen it happen, but Bucky’d never done it at Steve. Actually, he hadn’t even done it at Steve _now_ —the way he’d put the moves on Steve had been more desperate, less careful. Steve was gladder and gladder he’d said no.

Of course, Bucky seemed to hate him for it half the time. He stayed in Steve’s apartment, and sometimes he was friendly enough—he always started every conversation friendly enough—but he would flip like a switch out of nowhere, especially if they were alone.

He didn’t try to hurt Steve or anything. He just glared at him, and talked.

“You know you’re going to see a lot more of them,” Bucky said, leaning against the refrigerator and staring at Steve with his arms crossed. Steve was scrambling some eggs in the pan.

“What, more eggs?” he said.

“More _triggers_ ,” Bucky said. “There’s lots of them, all kinds—some I can remember, some I can’t. Most I can’t, since they fried me to hell.”

“But you’re pretty sure the eggs are okay, right?” Steve said. “Salt, pepper, Swiss—nothing’s gonna set you off?”

“You’re talking like it’s just an _allergy_ or something,” Bucky sneered.

“Well, it pretty much is,” Steve said. “It’s like—well, you know how my asthma would get worse when I was around certain smells—“

“You’re pulling my leg,” Bucky said. “You can’t be so stupid as to think this is like your _asthma_.”

“Well, it’s sort of like it,” Steve said. “Can you eat this or not?”

“I can eat it,” Bucky said.

Steve went back to stirring the eggs, but he knew Bucky was about to start up again. He probably was taking a deep breath so he could tell Steve as much bad stuff as possible without giving him a break.

Sure enough, Bucky said, “You know how they put them in?”

“Nope,” Steve said.

“Just like training a dog,” Bucky said. “A lab rat, maybe. Associate the stimulus with the behavior you want. Like for the whiskey, they’d give me a sip, then make me puke over and over.”

“Jesus,” Steve said.

“But it’s _just_ like asthma.”

“I didn’t mean that. Come on,” Steve said.

He scooped the eggs onto their plates next to the bacon he’d made earlier. Bucky followed him around the kitchen as he got the forks and glasses and juice. “You could make me stop breathing,” Bucky said. “I forget what the trigger is. Sure I’ll run into it one of these days. Just makes me hold my breath till I pass out.” He gave Steve a big toothy smile, leaning against the counter as Steve sat down at the table. “That one was a lot of fun to learn. It should be impossible—human body’s supposed to care about breathing more than anything.But then again, this isn’t a human body anymore.”

Steve’s eggs already felt cold. It was difficult to swallow; the bites went down into his throat as hard lumps. “What’d they want you to do that for?”

“Oh,” Bucky said. “It was just a punishment.” He sat down across from Steve and picked at a piece of bacon, taking little bites out of it as he held it.“Most of the triggers weren’t for missions. Just for if I got out of line.” Steve swallowed; Bucky fixed a look on him, eyes narrowed. “I heard what you said—that I must’ve remembered things, that I must have fought back. But it wasn’t like that at all. I never tried to fight them—I tried to do everything they wanted. I just got confused sometimes, and I messed up.” He took a bite of eggs and chewed thoughtfully. “Calling them punishments isn’t fair, maybe. If I got out of control, they shut me down. Or if I wasn’t talking correctly, they’d mute me. Or sometimes they’d make me deaf and blind and I—”

“Well, that does sound a _little_ like a punishment,” Steve couldn’t help saying.

“Aw,” Bucky said, “they just wanted me to pay more attention to my surroundings.”

He was smiling a little, and Steve felt pleased that he’d reacted in a way Bucky liked. It was obvious that Bucky was trying to shock him, scare him or piss him off. Maybe the best way to get through it was just not to be shocked.

But as if Bucky could hear Steve thinking he’d won, his face hardened and he said, “You know they never punished me physically, by beating me up or stuff like that. That kind of thing doesn’t make a dent. Your friend, though—he used to cry like a baby. They used to swear they got a little girl by accident instead of a man.” Steve could tell he hadn’t been able to let that slide—he must have reacted, because Bucky got a gleeful look, and continued: “A thing like me, it just rolls off my back—but they’d cut him and starve him and beat him up and he’d just _fold_. It was easy. And—” he laughed, a musical, rippling laugh. “When they broke his jaw, he _lost_ it. Not even because of the pain, but because he wasn’t good looking anymore. He was curled up there wailing because he was _ugly_. Can you imagine being so vain in a situation like that? Honestly, I think sometimes I’m an improvement—“

Steve threw his fork into the wall. It stuck in there next to the refrigerator, up to the bottom of the prongs.

“Huh,” Bucky said. He blinked. Then, drawing his human hand along his throat, he said, “You missed all my major arteries.”

“What?” Steve said. He was still shaken, the images running over him in sequence, like a comic strip—broken jaw, starving, curled up crying—and he couldn’t quite put together what Bucky was saying, or what he himself was trying to say back.

Bucky was laughing, not too kindly; Steve looked at him and he stopped. Bucky shrugged. “Think you’re a big man, don’t you? I could take you,” he said.

“What?” Steve said.

Bucky made a face at him and got up and went down the hall. His door closed. Steve went to start eating again, but he didn’t have a fork.

He went and knocked on Bucky’s door. “Hey,” he said. Bucky opened the door and looked at Steve around it. But he was leaning on the door jauntily, not hiding behind it, and he wasn’t blocking Steve’s view of the room. “I wasn’t trying to hit you,” Steve said. “Did you think I was trying to hit you?”

“Who cares?” Bucky said, rolling his eyes.

“You must think my aim is terrible,” Steve said. Bucky smiled a little smile, lightning quick.

“You were mad, anyway,” he said.

“I wasn’t,” Steve said. “Can I come in and talk to you?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“What do you think?” Steve said. “Of course you do.”

“It’s _your_ apartment!” Bucky said. “It’s _your_ room! This is _your_ friend’s body and _I_ sure don’t care—who the fuck are you asking for permission?”

“You,” Steve said.

“I don’t care,” Bucky said.

“I’m coming in then,” Steve said. Bucky rolled his eyes again.

The room was a little different than the last time Steve had seen in there. For a minute he couldn’t tell why; then he saw that Bucky had taken the sheets and blankets off the bed, leaving the bare mattress. A little pile of books, a radio, and several neatly folded pieces of clothing laid on the mattress; the sheets were balled up in a pile in the far corner of the room.

“You didn’t think something like me sleeps in a bed, did you?” Bucky practically snarled when he saw Steve looking.

“I knew you didn’t sleep in the bed,” Steve said. “You sleep in the closet, right?” He said it just to see Bucky’s reaction, but Bucky put on a poker face.

“How do you figure that?” he said.

“My hearing’s really good. Isn’t yours? Your closet’s right up against the kitchen—I can hear you breathing in the closet when I get up before you.”

“You were listening to me breathe?” Bucky said.

“I didn’t mean to,” Steve said.

“Well, I guess you caught me!” Bucky said in a singsong voice. “What’re you gonna do about it?”

“Nothing,” Steve said. “I’m just saying, I knew. You didn’t need to hide it from me like you did.”

“Oh, so you’re mad that I lied,” Bucky said.

Steve was going to get dizzy if this went on much longer. “I’m not—it just seemed inconvenient for you, washing your sheets all the time to convince me. I don’t care where you sleep.”

Bucky said, “But you should care about _knowing_ where I sleep.”

“Why?”

“Well, if you needed me in the night and you couldn’t find me—I shouldn’t keep you from knowing where I am, obviously.” He wasn’t being nasty anymore—now it seemed like he was trying to be helpful, walking Steve through something he should already know all about.

“Why would I need you at night?” Steve said. “I mean, I hate to tell you, Bucky, but I actually survived three years without you. I’m not gonna come wake you up ‘cause I need a glass of water or something.”

Bucky hesitated. “No, I mean—“ he said, and for a horrible moment Steve thought he was talking about sex. Instead he said, “You know, if you need me for Avengers business.”

“The Avengers is,” Steve said—“well, I haven’t heard anything from almost all of them. I think the Avengers is indisposed.”

“But Fury’s watching you for something,” Bucky said. He wrinkled his nose at Steve’s look. “You know that! You can’t have missed how he follows us around all the time. I’m trained to notice shit but—” He stopped and stared at Steve. “ _Really_?” he said. “He follows us all the time. You never noticed?”

“All the time?” Steve said.

“Well, often,” Bucky said. “It’s not the only thing he has to do with his time. God, did you even know he was alive? Am I blowing your world apart here?”

“What? Of course I know he’s alive,” Steve said. “He—“ He stopped, realizing he’d never told Bucky everything that had gone on during the fall of SHIELD. He associated the whole series of events so strongly with Bucky that, unconsciously, he’d assumed Bucky must know everything about it, even things he obviously hadn’t been privy to. “I guess there’s a lot I should have told you about.”

“You can say that again,” Bucky said. “I almost jumped out of my skin when I saw someone I shot peeking out from behind a mailbox. And besides, how am I supposed to have your back if I don’t even know half of who has it out for you?”

“You don’t need to have my back. It’s not your job,” Steve said.

“Oh, the hell it isn’t,” Bucky said. “You’re so stupid you practically walk into walls sometimes—doesn’t even surprise me you didn’t notice Fury. You always got your nose in your stupid YouPhone—“

“IPhone,” Steve said.

“Well, whatever it is, it sure makes you look like a walking target, the way you’re glued to it all the time.”

Steve couldn’t help smiling at this.

“What?” Bucky said.

“Most people tell me I’m not on the phone _enough_ ,” Steve said. “People laugh at me for reading a real newspaper and using paper maps and a compass.”

“Well, that’s stupid,” Bucky said. “How’re you gonna get places if you break your phone? Or if it ‘dies.’ It seems like they last about a minute after they get unplugged and then people run around like chickens with their heads cut off until they find another wall to stick their phone into.”

“Bucky, you love iPhones,” Steve said. “I don’t even believe you don’t know what they’re called.”

“I like them as a _novelty_ ,” Bucky said, “not as a new improved way for you to get in trouble.” He pointed at Steve accusingly. “See, I’m making you laugh. I’m not so bad, am I?”

Steve was nonplussed. “I never said you were.”

“You threw a fork at me.”

“I didn’t throw a fork at you,” Steve said. “I was trying to tell you that before you started yelling at me for having a phone.”

“I wasn’t yelling,” Bucky said.

Steve couldn’t tell if he was seriously concerned about this. “I know,” he said.

“You want to sit down?” Bucky said. He moved over some of the clothes on his bed to make room for someone to sit. “You look like you’re jitterbugging.”

“I do not,” Steve said. He sat down. “Maybe I was shifting my weight around a little—“

“I didn’t say you were _good_ at jitterbugging,” Bucky said.

He stood there across from Steve, and somehow—either so slow or so fast that Steve didn’t see it happening—Bucky squared his shoulders and put his hands behind his back. He was meeting Steve’s eyes, but he had his chin down so that even though Steve was sitting and Bucky was standing, it felt like he was looking up at Steve.

It looked like he was waiting for something, and it kind of gave Steve the creeps.

“You could sit down,” he suggested. He was thinking Bucky would sit on the bed with him, but instead Bucky sat on the floor and looked up at Steve with his hands in his lap. That was worse.

Steve tried not to look as uncomfortable as he was, but Bucky was just sitting there watching him with a completely blank expression.it wasn’t just that—it was the way that less than half a minute earlier, they’d been having a normal conversation. Had that even been real? Was Bucky still trying to put on an act for him?

“So first of all I wasn’t aiming for you,” Steve said.

“It’s okay if you were,” Bucky said. “I realize I was testing your patience—”

“You can’t seriously think it would be okay for me to stab you with a fork,” Steve said.

There was a pause and Bucky said, ducking his head a little, “No, I guess not.” Then he looked at Steve and said, “What, you gonna get mad at me again for treating you like Hydra?”

“I wasn’t mad at you in the first place,” Steve said. Impulsively, he swung himself off the bed and down onto the floor with Bucky. Bucky looked at him like he was an exotic plant, but Steve kept talking. “I’d never—I won’t ever do anything to hurt you. You don’t remember me ever doing things like that, do you?”

“No,” Bucky said. “Of course not. You must think I’m stupid.” He had changed tacks again and was glaring at Steve. Steve had to fight the urge to scoot back a little. He was right against the bed—there was nowhere else to go.

“Okay, never mind. I wanted to ask you something else, though. You said they’d make you blind and deaf sometimes.”

“What, you want to know what I did to deserve it?” Bucky said.

Steve just gave him a look.

“What?” Bucky said.

“Stop messing with me, Bucky. I’m trying to help.”

“I’m not _messing_ with you,” Bucky said with an offended laugh that made Steve think that was exactly what he was doing.

“Sure you’re not,” Steve said, and was rewarded by Bucky looking at him, sideways, with a closemouthed almost-smile. “What do you want me to do if something happens and you go blind and deaf? I don’t know sign language and I’m kind of—well, are we both still good on Morse?”

“I’m good on most languages and codes you can think of,” Bucky said. He didn’t sound pleased about it.

“I think I still know it pretty well, too,” Steve said. “You think I can tap on you and you’ll understand me?”

“Why?” Bucky said.

“So we can communicate when you can’t see or hear anything?”

“ _Why_?” Bucky was looking at Steve like he was a stain on the mattress.

“Well, it just—it just seems like it’d be kind of—well, you know. If you don’t know what’s going on and you can’t talk to anyone—” Bucky looked like he was about to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation. Steve looked away, staring at the floor, and said, “Uh. I’d think a person would be scared.”

He waited, and sure enough he could hear Bucky scoffing without even looking at him. “You just answered your own question there. A _person_ would be scared. What am I?”

Steve put his hand up and rubbed his temples. “Really, Buck. You want me to say you’re not a person?”

“It’s true.”

“What are you supposed to be, then?”

Steve risked a glance at Bucky. He wasn’t making a face right then—just, apparently, thinking. “I’m kind of like a piece of furniture,” he said. “Well, I’m entertaining. So I’m more like a phone. But if you turn your phone off and put it away in a drawer, it’s not gonna have a conniption.”

“Oh,” Steve said.

“So you don’t have to worry, is what I’m saying,” Bucky said. “Nothing bothers me.”

“You said it was a punishment, though,” Steve said. “Why’d they punish you that way if you didn’t care?”

“Why are you asking so many dumb questions?” Bucky said.

“I don’t know,” Steve said. “Just dumb, I guess.”

“I’ll say,” Bucky said. Then he said, “I wouldn’t mind if you put me with the stereo, if you leaned me against it so I could feel the music. I guess that’d be fun.”

“Okay, noted,” Steve said.

“But you might as well just shove me in a closet and forget about me,” Bucky said. “I mean, I’m not going to be good for anything when I’m like that.”

“Well, sorry, but I don’t want to do that,” Steve said. “I guess you’ll have to make do with the stereo.”

“Fine,” Bucky said.

“Fine,” said Steve.


	2. What to Think

Steve was so distracted that he forgot what Bucky had said about Nick Fury, and he didn’t remember it until he and Bucky went out to get cereal the next day. Bucky hadn’t been interested in trying cereal, but he’d seen some commercials on TV and now it was another item on the list of things he was astonishingly excited about.

Bucky went out by himself sometimes, but he had a tendency to try and finagle Steve to accompany him; or he’d call up Sam on Steve’s phone. Steve didn’t know what to make of Bucky’s need for company, especially since Bucky didn’t even seem to like him anymore. Maybe Bucky was being kind—maybe he thought Steve and Sam didn’t get out enough?—or maybe there was something else going on.

Could Bucky be afraid of Fury? Was Fury really following them? Steve figured Bucky must be right, but it was hard to believe that he’d never noticed Fury keeping tabs on them. It really worried him, if he hadn’t noticed. He could see and hear well enough that this just shouldn’t be happening; he should always know when someone was following him. But he wasn’t a sneaky person himself, and he worried that anticipating sneaky people would always be his blind spot.

Better Fury, of course, than someone who meant them harm. But Steve would be just as likely to miss those people. Sometimes he worried he skated through life oblivious, letting all these awful things unfold while he thought he was working to stop them.

“I’d eat that if I could eat it,” Bucky informed Steve. “Stop brooding.”

Steve looked down. He was holding the bagel he’d gotten at the donut shop a few doors down from their building. It was an everything bagel with strawberry cream cheese. “What can’t you eat on it?” he said.

“Well,” Bucky said, “it’s an everything bagel, so probably lots of reasons, right?” He’d gotten a plain donut with chocolate frosting, and he’d already gulped it down.

“I don’t know exactly what all an everything bagel includes,” Steve said.

“I mean, _everything_ ,” Bucky said. “It’s right in the name. So I shouldn’t risk it.” He turned his head to look at Steve. “I mean, what, you want me to try it? You think I should?”

“Nah, you’re right,” Steve said. It looked like Bucky was ramping up to something. It was only eight in the morning, and he was about to accuse Steve of trying to poison him with a bagel. 

“I’ll try it if you want,” Bucky said. “Is that what you want me to do? I’ll do whatever you want.”

“Oh, sure, go right ahead. Maybe poppyseed makes you gnaw off your arms and legs,” Steve snapped.

Bucky snorted. He actually stopped talking. Then he put his hand on Steve’s arm, gently, but firmly enough that it made him slow down. “He’s, uh…” Steve let Bucky rotate him so he was looking back in the direction they’d come in. “If you’re worried. He’s over there.” 

“Fury?” Steve said.

“No, Santa Claus. Behind those trees over there, you see?” 

The trees were about a block away now. “I didn’t see anything when we went by,” Steve said.

“Well, of course you didn’t,” Bucky said. “He’s not bad at his job. Besides, you were too busy worrying about if he was there or not to actually pay attention. Hey there!” he yelled, waving his arm at the the trees. Steve tensed up, but there was no response from over there. Bucky turned around and started walking away again.

“Bucky!” Steve said. Bucky stopped. “What are you doing?”

Bucky gave him a look. “I’m going to get cereal. But I don’t know if I want the kind with the parrots or the ones with the chocolate bats.”

“Aren’t you going to—I mean, if Fury is right over there—“

Bucky shrugged. “What do you want to do about it?” He looked back. “He’s gone now anyway. Guess he’s not afraid of me shooting him again, or he wouldn’t get so close to us—but he obviously doesn’t want to interact with us, either. Not yet, anyway.” He started walking again.

Steve walked alongside him. He finally took another bite of his neglected bagel.

“You think he wants revenge on me,” Bucky asked, “or he wants to hire you back?”

“Why would he want revenge on you?” Steve said. “That’s stupid.” Bucky stared at him. “Seriously, you have more reason to try and get revenge on him. Not that I think you’d want to.”

“I should be wanting revenge on a guy I almost killed? You’ll have to run that by me a lot slower,” Bucky said. “Remember—” He made finger guns and phew phew phew noises.

“Yeah, I remember that part,” Steve said, “but it wasn’t your fault, and SHIELD let it happen to you. He has only himself to blame.”

He was kind of surprised to hear himself say that. It was colder than he expected himself to be. And it wasn’t like he sat around stewing at Fury, who’d probably done more good than bad and had certainly saved Steve’s life; but he couldn’t tolerate the idea that Bucky had anything to apologize or be punished for.

Bucky was giving him a funny look, his mouth quirking up on one side. In a moment he shook his head and said, “You’re terrible at math, Steve. He wasn’t even born by the time they broke me in.”

“He still could have stopped it sooner,” Steve said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Bucky said. “Eat,” he said, pointing at Steve.

Steve took another bite. “You mean because they’d already done it to you?” he said.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full—you think I want to see that shit?” Bucky said. “And yes, that, but also ‘cause it doesn’t really bother me. Nothing bothers me. I told you.” They walked in silence for a minute; Steve turned his head to watch Bucky. Bucky winced, then shrugged exaggeratedly and said, “Anyway, I guess he wants you for something. Well, probably both of us—I’m no slouch, either, of course. Are we going?”

“I don’t know what he wants,” Steve said. “Maybe if he actually talked to me—” But he found he didn’t know. Yes, probably if Fury told him something that sounded important, he’d want to go. It was strange to not be working for such a long time. At the same time, he didn’t know if he’d be able to trust what other people told him again, even if he wanted to. Then he said, “ _We_?”

“What?” Bucky said.

“You said—we. You’d go on a mission for him if he asked you to?”

“ _What_?” Bucky said. He squinted at Steve. “Are you asking if I think he’s trustworthy? Don’t ask me—I barely know the guy, aside from the information I needed to hunt him down.”

“No, I—“ Steve took another bite of his bagel and tried to get his thoughts together as he chewed it.

“Nice job keeping your mouth closed,” Bucky said. “Your table manners are finally improving at age—twenty-nine, or however old you are now. How old _are_ you?”

“Bucky,” Steve said. “You said you’ve never liked killing people.” Bucky looked completely nonplussed. “You’d use your—skills, you’d go on missions? That’s something you want to do?”

“Oh no, not again,” Bucky said.

“What do you mean?” Steve said.

“ _Wa-a-ant_ ,” Bucky said. “That old nonsense. Don’t you _think_ I should go with you, when you get back into it? Wouldn’t it be more efficient? Wouldn’t that be easier on you?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Steve said, “but is that what _you_ want to do with your life?”

Bucky stopped walking. He turned and just looked at Steve. “So if,” he said, slowly, “so if I tell you I want to spend the rest of my life being a surrealist painter or a barber, what would you say to that?”

“I think barbers might have to use the electric clippers,” Steve said.

Bucky laughed out loud and then looked surprised. “Okay, okay,” he said. “What about a ballet dancer?”

“What about a veterinarian,” Steve said.

“Or a personal chef for a really rich person,” Bucky said.

“I think you should be a jockey,” Steve said. “You’re a little tall but—” He tensed up a little as Bucky got very close to him and started eyeballing him like he was looking for cracks in the material. “What?”

“What if I mean it?” Bucky said.

“I figured you did,” Steve said.

“Really,” Bucky said. “What would you say if I really, really wanted to be a—well, anything—“

“I’d say good luck,” Steve said. Bucky was still eyeballing him, so for lack of anything else to say, Steve commenced finishing his bagel.

///

One day Steve went to the Botanical Gardens to draw some ferns, and when he came back Sam was in the kitchen rummaging through the silverware drawer while Bucky, who was sitting on the kitchen table, carried on to him about something. When Steve came into the room Bucky jumped off the table like a dog that had just been caught eating somebody’s rare steak. “Come on, Buck,” Steve said automatically, “it’s—“

“—my table too,” Bucky finished; he said it very quietly so Sam couldn’t hear him, and glared at Steve pointedly. Bucky’d started it by the way he got off the table, but he obviously didn’t want Sam to know this kind of thing went on.

Bucky acted so much more normal around Sam. Well, around anyone who wasn’t Steve. Once Steve knew to keep his eyes open for it, he could see that Bucky was kind of suggestible no matter who was talking to him; but he didn’t ask Sam for permission to do things, most of the time, and that seemed to go hand in hand with not getting suddenly angry with him, the way he did with Steve.

It probably made sense, in a way Steve hadn’t worked out yet, but to be honest he was jealous. It pretty much just felt like Bucky liked everyone else better than Steve.

“So what are you talking about,” he said woodenly. Bucky obviously wanted him to paper over what had just happened, but it wasn’t like Sam could fail to notice the way Bucky had gone from twenty to zero.

“Well,” Sam said, “I _came_ here to borrow a grapefruit spoon, but that was decades ago. What is it now, 2044? By the time I leave your house there’s going to be a whole new societal structure and a bunch of confusing technology I can’t make sense of. I’m just gonna be an old, weird loser who doesn’t fit in with anyone. Oh wait—“

“Where’s your sensitivity training?” Bucky said, and turned back to Steve with a completely normal expression. His whole body had changed back from the doglike thing to relaxed, friendly lines. “I’ve been telling Sam I figured out the career of my dreams!”

“What’s that?” Steve said.

“He’s going to be a computer programmer,” Sam said. “Yeah, I was surprised too. He practically just _met_ a computer for the first time—I mean, he still doesn’t have a smartphone.”

“I’m going to get one,” Bucky said. “You’re taking me to that fruit store tomorrow.” This was directed at Sam. Steve snorted at that; even Sam had to know by now that Bucky knew the words Apple and iPhone. Steve even thought that Bucky’d had some kind of smartphone in the interim between Hydra and their reunion, for all that he was pretending unfamiliarity with them now.

“Bucky, who’s going to buy a phone at the ‘fruit store,’ is going to be a computer programmer,” Sam said.

“It seems really easy,” Bucky said. “It’s just _math_. Plus, I was reading all about programmers. They make more money than God, they’re expected to be kind of crazy—so you can act like whatever you want—and I’m pretty sure they can work from home. It sounds like a charmed life.”

“When my question is,” Sam said, “well, two questions. First question is since when does Bucky want to stay home, act weird, and not see people, instead of running around chatting up strangers like he does every chance he gets?”

It wasn’t a bad question. Steve could hazard a few guesses at the answer—that the longer Bucky stayed in public, and the more consistent time he spent with someone, the more cracks would start to appear. He’d get a little tired, maybe, and people might start to take note of things about him that didn’t add up. When Bucky had first come back Steve hadn’t suspected anything until they’d spent fifty or a hundred hours together, at least.

Bucky loved meeting strangers. But meeting strangers wouldn’t be like having coworkers.

“Well, working from home doesn’t have to mean working from _home_ ,” Bucky said brightly, after a little pause. “People can work anywhere these days. You can go on that—Inter-knot—“

“Give me a fucking break,” Sam said.

“Okay, okay,” Bucky said. “The Internet. I admit it, I know what it’s called, and you can go on it anywhere. I could work from a hot air balloon if I want. I could work from a bar.”

“That sounds hard,” Steve said. “You’re gonna feel obligated to flirt with anyone who seems lonely.”

“No, I’m great at concentrating on work,” Bucky said. “That’s one thing I have to show for—you know, what happened to me. So I’m gonna get a computer, get some books, start teaching myself that stuff. Shouldn’t be too hard for me.”

There was another little pause. Steve couldn’t help but think that Bucky probably didn’t care too much about being able to use a hot air balloon as an office. On the other hand, he actually had good reason to want a job where he didn’t have to be around the same people all the time, and where—apparently—people wouldn’t put too much weight onto any strange behavior.

When Sam first said it, Steve’s first reaction had been to think that Bucky was just making this up to be distracting, or maybe that he was screwing with Steve. It wasn’t a great feeling, being so inured to being screwed with, but he’d gotten used to it over the past few weeks, the way Bucky would just throw random ideas and accusations at Steve to see how he’d respond. But Bucky seemed to have put some thought into this. Maybe it was something he actually wanted.

The pause wasn’t so little anymore. Bucky was standing there, looking at Steve, and his body still looked normal but his eyes were starting to take on that blank, waiting look. “So Steve,” he said. “What do you think about that?”

“I think it’s a good idea,” Steve said, and then—there wasn’t really anything else to say, was there?“Sam, what’s your other question?”

“Yeah, okay, it’s a much bigger question than the first one,” Sam said. “Why the hell is your silverware drawer like this?” He pulled a handful of forks and knives out of the drawer. “You are the only people who keep your silverware in a weird pile instead of using an organizer, which would cost about two dollars. Fifty cents if you go to Thrift Town. This looks like a pirate’s treasure chest except with no actual treasure and I can’t find the grapefruit spoon, which is the reason I came over here in the first place.”

“That’s mean, Buck,” Steve said. “You know that isn’t where we keep the grapefruit spoon.”

Sam gasped.

“Well, you would’ve left if you found it,” Bucky said, “and I wanted to spend time with you. If you’d found it right away old Steve wouldn’t have gotten to see you at all.”

“You’re older than me,” Steve said.

Bucky went in the other drawer where he and Steve kept dedicated utensils like grapefruit spoons, paring knives, and the mysterious sporks. He solemnly held out a grapefruit spoon to Sam. “Happy now?” he said. “Now that you’ve treated us like grapefruit spoon dispensers instead of friends?”

“How can I be happy when I’m looking at you?” Sam said. “Man, show some hospitality. I can’t believe you’d actively trick me into looking through all your bent rusty silverware for an hour.”

“Whether you can believe it or not isn’t my problem,” Bucky said.


	3. If You're Going to Write a Comedy Scene, You're Going to Have Some Rat Feces in There

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: You're about to hear a lot about torture and mutilation, especially genital mutilation!

“Wait, did you want the chocolate bats or the one with the parrots?” Steve said. In the end they’d gotten both kinds of cereal, in a rush of frivolity.

There was silence. Steve turned around to see Bucky just standing there gazing at him, with the little shy sliver of smile. His eyes were as big as saucers. Steve barely took this in before Bucky’s eyes narrowed and he practically snarled, “I just remembered I’m not hungry!” He reached out, knocked a bunch of magazines off the table next to him, and strode off down the hall.

“Bucky, come on,” Steve said weakly. Bucky went into his room and slammed the door.  “You know it’s not made out of _real_ parrots, right? No parrots were harmed.”

The door creaked open and Bucky poked his head out. “You’re so stupid.”

“Yeah, I heard about that,” Steve said.

Bucky came back into the kitchen and started picking the magazines up. He looked at them. “Did you have these organized by date?” he asked.

“No,” Steve said.

“Yes, you did,” Bucky said. “What’s on top, newest or oldest.”

“Oldest,” Steve said. “I stopped reading them for a while last year, I’m trying to catch up.” Bucky flipped through the magazines, arranging them in order. “Are you really not hungry?” Steve asked.

Bucky squinted at the subscription sticker. “Who knows,” he said. “You think this body can tell shit like that anymore? It hardly was relevant.”

“I’m hungry,” Steve said.

“So eat then.”

“I mean, our bodies probably aren’t different. More like each other’s than anyone else’s, at least.”

“I got a hollow arm,” Bucky said, “so I need more food.”

“Okay, okay. But we ate dinner at the same time, so if I’m hungry now you probably are too. It makes sense for us to eat together if you can’t tell.”

“I don’t have any problem with that,” Bucky said.

“Is your arm really hollow?”

“I don’t know,” Bucky said. He knocked on it with his other hand. “Hm, what do you think?”

“It sounds solid,” Steve said. “This, on the other hand—” He tapped on Bucky’s head and tilted his head to the side, pretending to listen. “Not so much.”

“I’ll say—I can’t even tell you what kind of cereal I like,” Bucky said. “It’s the parrots, by the way.”

Steve preferred the bats. He poured the two kinds of cereal into two bowls and got out some milk and poured it over them. He got spoons and put the milk away.

Bucky was standing next to the stack of magazines, which he had put pretty much in order. He was standing with his hands by his sides, looking at the two bowls of cereal.

Steve felt exhausted. “Come on, Buck, one of these is for you.” He couldn’t bring himself to give anything more explicitly like permission, so he just kind of awkwardly motioned to the bowls.

Bucky came over and they sat at the table. He gave Steve an apologetic smile. “Sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” Steve said.

“Cripes, I never said it was my fault,” Bucky said. “You’re upset. I’m sorry. Is that allowed?”

“I’m not upset,” Steve said.

Bucky laughed. “Oh, of course. You’re never upset. How could I have forgotten?” He smiled crookedly. When Steve smiled back, Bucky started putting away the cereal at top speed.

He was clearly really hungry, but Steve immediately knew that Bucky would get nervous or mad if he thought Steve knew that. He looked away to keep from reacting, and then threw caution to the wind and said, “Can I pick your brain for a minute?”

“It’s better than picking my nose,” Bucky said.

“What did you think would happen if you chose the wrong kind of cereal?”

Bucky swallowed his bite and drew in a long, slow breath. “You don’t fuck around, do you?”

“I guess not,” Steve said.

He ate his cereal and listened while Bucky leaned on his right forearm—Bucky never ate with his elbows on the table—and said conversationally, “What are you imagining? That I think you’re gonna say, ‘Sorry, pal, wrong answer, now you don’t eat for a week?’ Or—what—that I think you’re gonna break my legs? Hold my head underwater? Pull off my fingernails and see how long it takes me to grow them back?”

He’d been looking sideways, displaying a great interest in some of the kitchen cupboards, but now he met Steve’s eyes. His eyebrows were raised and he was smiling, but not in a scared or a mean way. He was challenging, curious. Steve had read the file backwards and forwards, so he just kept eating cereal. He raised his eyebrows back.

Bucky took another bite of cereal. “Well,” he said, “it doesn’t actually get as far as any of that in my head. If I think it through I know you’re not going to do any of those things. It’s hard to imagine you doing more than hitting me. But for the last—I don’t know how long it was, but for a long time—all anybody had to do was give me a look, or grab my arm, or _maybe_ slap me—“ he made a face to show Steve how unlikely this was—“All that fingernails stuff _happened_ , in the beginning, but once I was really obedient I didn’t need anything to be afraid of but not being obedient.”

He gave Steve a challenging look again, and this time he just waited for Steve to say something. “I think I understand,” Steve said. “So, should I not ask you questions about what you want? I mean, what do you want me to do?” Bucky cracked a smile. “Aw, shit, I just did it again,” Steve said. He slapped himself on the forehead. “Seriously, though. What do you think would help?”

“Well, probably nothing,” Bucky said, then laughed. “Okay, well—not like everything’s hopeless. Just that—well, what are you supposed to do? You can’t never ask me a question. It’s nothing to do with you, but you’re going to remind me of them sometimes. A lot. And when that happens I’m going to act weird.”

“It’s not weird,” Steve said. Bucky looked at him like he’d just sprouted another head. “Look, it’s not like you’re crazy or anything,” Steve said. “The kind of people you were around—the way you act makes sense. If I was like them, you’d be acting normal for the situation.”

“O-kay,” Bucky said, “but you’re _not_ them, so it’s _weird_.” They had a little stare off, and then Bucky asked, “Can I have some more cereal?”

“I—“ Steve said, and then caught himself. He wasn’t sure what he thought he should say.

Bucky caught himself, too, and looked at Steve anxiously. Then he said, “I’m gonna have some more cereal. I’m hungry.” He got up and opened the cupboard. “That other bowl wasn’t big enough.” He got a mixing bowl out and filled it with milk and cereal, then came back to the table with it. He sat down and looked at Steve, almost angrily. “What do you think?”

“I’ve done that before,” Steve said. “People like us can get really hungry.”

“God, you must think I’m crazy,” Bucky said.

“For eating out of a mixing bowl?”

Bucky sighed. He stopped eating and put his head on his arms. “You know,” he said, “I bet it’s hard to believe, but I never meant to hurt you. I just thought it would be easy to be him. I guess I even thought I _was_ him, until you pointed out I wasn’t.”

“I never said that.”

“Six of one, half dozen of the other. I don’t act or feel like the guy you were friends with. I didn’t—” Bucky sighed again. He pushed the spoon around in his huge bowl of cereal. “I could say I’m sorry for lying, but I’m actually just sorry I got caught. I bet if I’d been able to make you happy before you noticed, you wouldn’t have cared so much. That’s why—I thought if I gave you something you wanted you’d stop asking me so many questions, you know? But I didn’t make the decision fast enough. What?” Steve’s horror must have shown on his face, because Bucky looked puzzled, then angry. “For fuck’s sake, I don’t even look that different. You act like you’d rather be boiled in oil than make it with me. When I tried after you figured out I wasn’t him, you looked like you were about to throw up every time I touched you.”

“Are you serious?” Steve said. “I’m not _insulting_ you—it just wouldn’t be right.”

“I don’t see what’s wrong with it,” Bucky said. “Just because you think I don’t _wa-a-ant_ it”—he rolled his eyes to show how stupid the whole concept was—“I mean, I can’t help being like this, and it didn’t bother me until you started acting like it was bad.”

“It doesn’t bother you,” Steve said.

“Why should I care? That’s _person_ bullshit,” Bucky said impatiently. “The point is it’s like it was this killing blow to your johnson! You spent practically your whole life staring at this body with glassy eyes, and now you’re completely”—he gestured—“you’ve flipped, like you can’t get away fast enough.”

“I never ‘flipped’ how I felt,” Steve said. Bucky glanced up. “I still don’t want to,” Steve said, “but it’s—“ He struggled with the words. It seemed too obvious to him to have to explain it, but Bucky’d clearly heard something different every time they’d talked about it so far.

It had occurred to him that there might be no right way to say it, but it was worth a try.

“Okay, so—“ Steve tried to scan through some memories of girls Bucky had dated, to see if he could come up with specific examples. Steve didn’t know as much about the guys—Bucky hadn’t really talked to him about them. “Would you have sex with a girl who was just trying to get back at another guy?”

Bucky thought about it. “Depends on if I agree with her reasoning,” he said. “I mean, if I think the guy deserves it. Probably, yeah. It seems polite to take the girl’s side.”

“No, I mean,” Steve said, “not because of the other guy. Because you know she’s hung up on him and not on you.”

“Well, we’re not getting _married_ ,” Bucky said. “We can still have fun—she doesn’t have to be hung up on me for that. But I don’t get the question. Does the girl represent one of us? And who is that person hung up on?” Before Steve could say anything, Bucky said, “Oh, shit. Is this about Carter?”

“Oh,” Steve said. “Actually, no.” Bucky leaned forward, suddenly solicitous, concerned. “It’s really not!” Steve said. He wasn’t going to say he was over Peggy—it wasn’t like that—but he knew things were over between them, and the part of him that got interested in people knew that too.

“I wasn’t thinking about that, Stevie,” Bucky said. “I’m sorry. It must be crazy for you, losing her.”

Steve was on the verge of yelling at Bucky for calling him Stevie and looking at him all soft-eyed, like Steve was an orphaned kitten, but something stopped him just in time. He realized what stopped him was the very thing he wanted to yell about. A minute before Bucky had been chewing Steve out for rejecting him on what Bucky saw as an incredibly vague technicality. But now he himself had flipped, because—

Well, was it an instinct, maybe? Because part of him still saw Steve as someone he needed to protect? It was insulting, but Steve couldn’t be above using it.

“Bad example,” he said. “Let me try again. What about _I’ve_ never done anything. I’ve hardly even kissed anyone.”

“Still?” Bucky said. “ _Really_?”

“Yes, okay?” Steve snapped.

“Sorry,” Bucky said. “I didn’t—I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it.”

“I know there’s nothing wrong with it,” Steve said. “But let’s say I didn’t. Say we didn’t know each other that well, and we were seeing each other, and I was embarrassed about being, you know, a virgin. Say I didn’t want you to know.”

“You better not ever be embarrassed about it,” Bucky said, “or let me hear about anyone making you feel bad about it—”

“Of course I’m not, it’s an _example_. You know much worse stuff about me than that and I’m not gonna hide that stuff either. But let’s say I did want to hide it—say I really hung the moon on what you thought of me, and I kept pushing for you to hurry up and start on me and do everything really fast. And—you know, say I wasn’t ready, that it seemed like it might hurt me or something but I was pushing anyway.” Bucky winced. “You wouldn’t want someone to just go along with me, even if I was coming on to them really hard, in that situation. Because there’s—extenuating circumstances.”

Steve expected Bucky to get mad again when the penny dropped, but he didn’t. Instead he just wrinkled his forehead up, thinking. “So that’s what you see it as?” he said. “That I just—“

“It’s not fair to you,” Steve said. “Not because I don’t like you. But because right now it’s—you’re so worried about what I think. So—if you ever _do_ want to, later, when things are more—different—then—“

Bucky made a face. “I’m always gonna be this worried about what you think.”

“You don’t know that,” Steve said. “It might just take time.”

Bucky shook his head. Steve kept waiting for him to get mad again, but it wasn’t happening yet. “I don’t think so. I’m something different now, I’m made to work for other people, so—” He shook his head again, violently. “Don’t make any kind of stupid face about that.”

“No stupid face,” Steve said, raising his palms up like Bucky often did. “Neutral face. How’s this?”

“I’m sorry, that’s your not stupid face?” Bucky said. He made a show of squinting and examining Steve. “But, seriously, I—it doesn’t matter. Like I said, something like me isn’t ever going to mind being what I am, which is a thing, you know?” He was serious again, even earnest. “I might never be a real person again, exactly.” He looked at Steve.

“Okay,” Steve said.

“That’s it, it’s okay?” Bucky said.

“It’s none of my business if you’re a person or not,” Steve said. “If it really doesn’t bother you.”

“Thanks, Steve,” Bucky said. He looked down, pushing his spoon around the bottom of the huge bowl, which it barely even reached. Then he said, “You really don’t want to unless I—want it? Unless I really—prefer it to something else, or whatever?”

“That’s right.”

Bucky had looked back up from his cereal. He was biting his lip. “Actually,” he said, “I know for a fact that’s never going to happen. I don’t like it anymore.” He opened his eyes really wide at Steve like he was daring him to say something.

“You mean, with guys?” Steve said.

“No, not with anyone. Not with _me_ ,” Bucky said. “My dick doesn’t work. Well, it’s”—he squinted, trying to find the words—“it’s not that it doesn’t work exactly. It can still do anything it’s supposed to do, but it’s not…”

He was looking at Steve like he’d somehow be able to finish the sentence.

“What, it’s upside down now or something?” Steve said.

It wasn’t the best joke of his life, but Bucky laughed. “It’s a really disgusting story,” he said. “Really long story, too.”

“So? We’re under no time pressure,” Steve said.

“Did I mention it’s disgusting?” Bucky said.

It was strange to see him hesitant like this, when he’d been telling Steve awful things for weeks. “How bad can it be?” Steve said. “I can take it.”

“Oh, right,” Bucky said. He snorted.

“I’m just gonna get more cereal,” Steve said, “for the long haul.” When he was standing at the cupboard, Bucky said, from the table, “So when they first had me, I used to jerk off a lot. They just left me in this cell all the time, gave me…well, not enough food. Water I did get, so that’s one way I was lucky. But otherwise—well, it was kind of boring, plus half the time they’re breaking my fingers and shit, so—“

“How’d you jerk off with broken fingers?” Steve asked.

Bucky grinned. “Oh, I always found a way.” Steve sat back down at the table; Bucky looked at him, worked his jaw for a minute, and then said cheerfully, “I’d brace my fingers against my leg and thrust into it. It was a little hard to stay braced, but I had a way of doing it. I always figured something out—I mean, I had a lot of time on my hands. My _hand_!” He laughed. “Just one hand, but lots of time. It’s funny because, uh—your friend liked making it with people, a lot—”

“Well, yeah, I remember,” Steve said.

“Not _that much_ , though,” Bucky said. “He liked going out with people. He liked dancing and flirting and sweet talking girls, and talking them into letting him make them feel good—the fairies didn’t need as much convincing.” He got a fond distant look, then shook his head. “Anyway, either way, it wasn’t…him getting off wasn’t the only part. But there, in that cell, it was the only thing I had, so I did it all the time. And I mean _all_ _the time_ —you know how the serum is—you _do_ know, don’t you?”

He gave Steve a considering look; a moment passed before Steve realized he was really going to have to answer. “Yes,” he said, willing himself not to blush.

“So you know—he could just keep going and going,” Bucky said. “For a long while, anyway. And when I was jerking off I wasn’t there, I could use my imagination. I gave myself this super improved sex life, in my mind.”

“Sounds like a good time,” Steve said. It was odd to hear this; they’d rarely talked about jerking off or sex when they were younger. Maybe, because Bucky knew how Steve felt about him—maybe he’d thought it best not to bring it up.

“Well, it was,” Bucky said. “But—“

“Yeah?” Steve said. He took a big bite of cereal to show he wasn’t uncomfortable.

Bucky leaned forward; he’d pushed his empty mixing bowl out of the way so he had room to practically lie down on the table. He sprawled out, comfortably, and said in a stage whisper, “ _They cut my dick up_.” He giggled.

Steve burst out laughing, which was mostly from shock, but if it made him look unruffled it was pretty convenient. “What?” He struggled for words. “Uh…diagonally or horizontally?”

Bucky beamed at him and wiggled his fingers around. “Like this. It was all still attached—they’d just cut it into strips. It grew back together—it looks normal, now. I don’t think anyone would ever guess from looking at it. The wonders of science, right?”

“I guess,” Steve said. Sometimes he felt like his head was going to explode from trying so hard to say the right thing.

“It really—well, it wasn’t _so_ bad the first time,” Bucky said thoughtfully. “They just halved it. It hurt, but it was still my dick. But then they just—well, they did a lot of things to a lot of parts of me. That’s how they…well, you know. Sometimes, I can’t help thinking the wonders of science aren’t so wonderful.”

“Me too, sometimes,” Steve said.

“Well, you would have taken it better than me,” Bucky said. “You wouldn’t have broken. But I’m…well, I’m just about the most easily swayed person on the planet, because I’m no Steve Rogers but I heal just as fast. And there’s something that really gets to you about hearing your bones break, or looking your guts in the face—even if you _know_ it’ll all be fine. And with someone like me, it’s no skin off their nose, because there’s no permanent damage as long as you don’t fully remove anything. It always knits back together. There’s pretty much no part of me I haven’t seen in pieces.”

Bucky paused. He was looking at Steve curiously. Steve rummaged around in his mind for something that sounded smart, but he ended up saying just what he was thinking. “Buck, I’d probably have broken too. Anyone would.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Bucky said. “You’d have fought harder. Not like me. They got practically everything the first time they cut up my eyes. Well, I _thought_ I’d given them everything, anyway. But anyway—you know, first time, my dick grows back together, and I tried to keep off it for a while, since they didn’t like me touching myself. They used to, uh…” He swallowed and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, and that expression surprised Steve more than anything had in weeks. “Well, it doesn’t—not relevant.” He smiled and spread his hands out like an emcee introducing a new performer. “They kept going, ‘cause I couldn’t stop for long. I was just so bored, and it was _there_. They kept doing it…And then one time they really—I don’t know if they put me out, or if I just don’t remember the operation. But I wake up, I look down, and there was all this raw meat down there. Like hamburger meat. It didn’t look like anything that would be part of a body. And I just about lost my mind, when I saw that. I begged them to take it off me, said I’d do anything they wanted if they’d take that meat off me. And they, well.” Bucky’s smile grew and grew, and he gazed at Steve intensely. “They didn’t. ‘Cause they knew, at that point, I’d do anything they wanted anyway. What do you think of that?”

“Uh. It grew back from that?” Steve asked.

“Yeah,” Bucky said. He grimaced. “It looks normal. You’d never know, and I still—I practiced, in case you wanted to…well, I can make it do everything it’s supposed to do, make it seem like I’m really enjoying myself, but…”

“But you don’t,” Steve said.

“Nope!” Bucky said. “I mean, maybe the dick is enjoying itself, but it’s not _my_ dick, if you see what I mean. It’s just…on me.” He waved his right wrist around, letting his hand dangle limply from it. “Like so. Dead thing stuck to my body, making like it lives there. Makes me want to throw up sometimes, when I think about using it to _get off_. Think about the fact that I used to _touch people_ with it.” He made a face—he wasn’t looking Steve in the eye. Then he did make eye contact, and he smiled, charmingly, as if for a picture. “Any more questions?”

“I,” Steve said. “Well, I’m sure glad that we didn’t do anything, given you feel that way about it.”

Bucky looked put out. “Well, you wouldn’t have known,” he said. “I’m a real good actor. It would have been just as good for you.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Steve said. “Still wouldn’t want to put you through that.” Bucky rolled his eyes. “Hey! You said—you said ‘there’s no part of you you haven’t seen in pieces.’”

“Yeah, that’s true,” Bucky said. “What’s the question?”

“You said they cut your eyes up. How’d you see that?”

“What?” Bucky said. He squinted at Steve.

“Well, you couldn’t see it,” Steve said. “How’d you see it when they were cutting up your eyeballs? How could you see anything without your eyes?”

Bucky’s shoulders relaxed. “Are you serious?” he said. “What kind of stupid question is that?”

“I just wondered,” Steve said. The next thing he knew, Bucky was up, around the table, and squeezing the life out of him. Since Steve was sitting down, he ended up with his head awkwardly wedged into Bucky’s neck. Bucky didn’t say anything for a minute; he just hugged Steve, his flesh arm trembling with the force of it. Not really being in a position to hug back, Steve reached up and put his hand on the arm.

Bucky shifted a little bit and kissed Steve on his hairline. “Sorry,” he said, letting go of Steve and stepping back. “I don’t mean anything funny. You know that. It’s just—you’re the _worst_.”

Steve nodded. Bucky turned on his heel and went off down the hall towards his bedroom. “Hey,” Steve said. “Don’t you want to finish your cereal?”

He craned his neck around to see Bucky looking back at him from the hallway. “‘M not hungry,” Bucky said. “What, you mad at me for wasting food?” Before Steve could say anything, Bucky pointed at him. “No,” he said, “you’re not,” and he turned away and went into his room.


	4. Button Up Your Overcoat

Steve would have been too ashamed to say it to anyone, but part of him wished Bucky wouldn’t touch him so much. It was awful to even think that, because the touching was good. It wasn’t like the ways he had been touching Steve before—trying to seduce him, or trying to make him uncomfortable. It wasn’t sharp or mean. Ever since that conversation, Bucky had touched Steve in ways that were perfectly normal.

Bucky would run his hand across Steve’s back when Steve was leaning over and gazing at the kitchen counter, trying to figure out if one of the specks needed to be cleaned off, or if it was a natural part of the counter. It would take Steve a minute to realize what had happened. Then he would look up and Bucky would be standing across the room, smiling at him.

He’d squeeze Steve’s shoulder while they were talking. He’d mess up Steve’s hair and make fun of him. “It looks better,” he’d say. “Stop worrying,” he’d say, and aggressively smooth out Steve’s forehead with his fingers.

It was stupid for it to bother Steve, because—well, first of all, it was a good thing. It felt genuine, like Bucky actually wanted to do it. It wasn’t like Bucky had stopped saying all of the awful things he said, but he had cut down on them a little, and even when he was describing how weird and pathetic he’d looked, like an old man, after Hydra pulled out all his teeth—well, there was a sense of kindness about it. The teeth conversation took place when Steve was brushing his in the bathroom, and halfway through describing the blood that ran out of his mouth and dried on his chin and neck, caking there for weeks, Bucky slouched against the sink and laughed softly.

“What?” Steve said, leaning around him to spit out his toothpaste. Bucky hip checked his shoulder. Steve straightened up and said, “I’m on the edge of my seat, Buck. What happened to the blood after that?” Bucky laughed again. “What, you gonna leave me on a cliffhanger?”

Bucky wrapped his arms around him and Steve didn’t mind, even though he never got a chance to put down his toothbrush and had to just awkwardly hold it in midair while Bucky hugged him and said quietly, into his neck, “You’re a riot.”

“Am not!” Steve said.

Bucky squeezed him tighter. “Yeah, you are,” he said.

Bucky’d always been very touchy and affectionate with everyone, and especially with Steve; and Steve had had a crush on Bucky for large parts of his teens and twenties. Those two facts had coexisted, and most of the time Steve didn’t find it to be too much trouble. Yes, there were some difficult times, like during his pathetic excuse for a growth spurt when he kept getting turned on every time Bucky threw an arm thoughtlessly over his shoulders, and jealous every time Bucky did it to someone else. But he’d long, long, _long_ since gotten over that.

And now he knew for a fact that Bucky could never want him, could never want anyone. All he should be feeling was happiness that Bucky trusted him enough to touch him in a casual, friendly way. Instead part of him kept _reacting_. He wasn’t getting hard, thank God, but he worried it was only a matter of time. When Bucky gave him a big hug or grabbed his arm and hauled Steve across the room to show him something, his heart raced and he felt dizzy.

It was horrible of him, and he kept trying to give himself little talks, trying to visualize the horrible story Bucky had told him. If Bucky had ever been interested in Steve—which he never had anyway—that part of him had been systematically destroyed and it didn’t exist anymore.

After a week or so of the touching, Steve thought that he’d managed to get used to it. His heart wasn’t racing so much. Maybe he’d just needed a little time.

Then Bucky started talking about teaching Steve to dance. That was when Steve felt, not for the first time in his life, that he had been individually cursed by God.

///

Bucky came home from Sam’s house with a mix CD and a Ziploc bag of Girl Scout cookies. “Taste these for me, will you?” he said, shaking the bag in Steve’s face. They sat down at the table together and sorted through the cookies—mint, no; caramel, no; peanut butter, yes. Bucky herded his cookies into a little pile on his side of the table where Steve couldn’t have reached them if he wanted to, which he didn’t. “So, I’m gonna teach you how to dance,” he said.

It was when Steve’s mouth was full, too. He didn’t even care; he swallowed so fast he almost choked, got over it, and said, “Buck, you already tried that about a thousand times.” It was true. Steve was an innately horrible dancer. And at this juncture, the idea of Bucky holding on to his shoulder or his waist or his hand—and holding on to Bucky in those places—just seemed like the minefield of the century.

“No, no,” Bucky said. He waved his hand impatiently at Steve. “Dancing was harder back then. Lots more work. Sam was showing me on YouTube today—“

Steve snorted. If he had his wits about him, Bucky always “accidentally” referred to YouTube as MeTube. But he was distracted.

“Don’t know what you’re giggling about,” Bucky said. “Get this. They hardly do anything at all nowadays. Practically everything is dancing. You just have to move back and forth with the music and kind of grab your hair and stick your hips out.” He sighed heavily. Steve couldn’t help noticing that Bucky sounded a little offended; then Bucky did sigh, and he said, “It’s a pretty pathetic excuse for dancing, but the point is, you woke up at the right time because you’re a pretty pathetic dancer. Sam said he’s never seen you dance, not even in the car.”

“Why would I dance in the car?” Steve said.

Bucky gave him a stern look. “If you have to ask, you’ll never know. Anyway, he made a CD for us to practice with. Lots of modern songs that we might not even know yet!”

“Traitor,” Steve muttered.

“He said they’re really easy songs to dance to. Strong repetitive beats. You have to try it, Steve. You don’t want to tell Sam that he put in all that work for nothing.”

Pretty soon Bucky was putting the terrible CD in the stereo and making fun of the other CDs Steve had in there. “Okay, okay,” Steve said. The music started, and he waited for Bucky to show him some dance moves, but Bucky just leaned against the wall and stared at him.

“Well?” Bucky said when Steve just leaned against the opposite wall and looked back at him and started doing an imitation of Bucky’s affected slouch. Bucky never had trouble standing up straight—he just wanted to look nonchalant.

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” Steve said. At least the music was familiar—he had heard some of it on the radio, and most of it from Sam or with other friends. If Bucky wasn’t staring at him like a creep maybe he could have swayed or tapped his fingers a little, but that was a no go; he felt like a butterfly under glass and had just as much freedom of movement.

Bucky sighed and charged over to him. He reached out for Steve but then, to Steve’s horror, he stopped and looked at him curiously. “What?”

“Nothing,” Steve said.

“I don’t mean anything funny,” Bucky said. “You know that, right?”

He didn’t seem mad; actually, he had a very gentle look on his face, like Steve was one of the ugly animal figurines Bucky’s mom kept on the mantelpiece. “Of course I know that,” Steve said.

“Good,” Bucky said. “Okay. Here. Feel this.” Then he put his hands on Steve’s shoulders and just stroked out from there to his fingers. Of course it didn’t feel like handsiness; Bucky had the studiedly friendly, half-distracted look he’d used to have when Steve was really sick.  Most of the times that happened, they weren’t living together and so Bucky had to come over to take care of him—or rather, he decided to, and Steve would be poised to start yelling at him as soon as the door opened.

If Bucky hadn’t been so good at the distracted look, then the yelling would have happened. He didn’t need to be there, he was wasting his time—Steve would manage it on his own, or if he couldn’t get through it on his own, maybe he didn’t deserve to. It was the kind of self-pity that you’d convince yourself was self-sacrificing. If Bucky had seemed nervous, or tender, when he was changing the sheets or coaxing Steve into eating and drinking and taking medicine, Steve would have just up and strangled him under the power of his own embarrassment. But Bucky wasn’t like that; it must have taken effort, but he made it seem like it was so mundane he couldn’t even remember it was happening.

Sometimes Bucky would rub his back—that was one thing Steve remembered especially. Sometimes he fantasized about it later, but at the time there was nothing sexual about it. It was just that his back was already all tied in knots, and the ache of sickness on top of it really got on his nerves. Like most of Steve’s pains it wasn’t the kind of thing that would make you shout, and he figured it wouldn’t bother him so much if it didn’t last so long. But instead it lasted, and it stacked on top of all the other things that weren’t all that bad but lasted, and he didn’t realize how much it was frustrating him until Bucky made it a little better.

He’d lie on his stomach and turn his face from the pillow and try to get it together to say that Bucky didn’t need to do this. It wasn’t like Steve was going to die from his back hurting. Besides—although it wasn’t like he would have said this—part of him felt guilty somehow about being touched, especially on one of the more screwed up parts of his body. It couldn’t be pleasant to look at or feel, it was all crooked, and it made him half thankful he never got anywhere with girls.

But the reasons he should tell Bucky to stop were also the reasons he didn’t want it to stop. It wasn’t necessary, it was a waste of time, he’d probably go back to hurting within half an hour—but the wastefulness of that kind of thrilled him. There was something addictive about feeling like you were important enough to get relief just for the sake of it. Part of him would want to let go of his awareness of how his body looked, and just feel better. 

But he couldn’t let go, so he’d turn his head and prepare to tell Bucky it was fine to stop, he was already feeling better. And Bucky wouldn’t even be looking at him—he’d have his eyes fixed lackadaisically on something above him, maybe the weird white shadow on the wall where a picture used to be. Before Steve could start talking Bucky would start up talking himself, telling Steve some story that Bucky claimed was crazy but which half the time was usually pretty boring except for the way Bucky inserted a bunch of commentary like, “you’re not gonna believe this,” like Steve’s hair was going to turn white from shock just because Bucky’s sister’s cat had left a mouse head on the kitchen table. Steve would be following the dumb story, waiting for Bucky to pause more than a millisecond so Steve could point out how dumb it was, and then Bucky would say, “That okay?” while doing something that felt like heaven, and Steve would say, “Yeah,” and Bucky would keep telling the awful excuse for a story. It would take a while for Steve to realize that he’d never asked Bucky to stop, that he’d forgotten now to even focus on asking. 

It was a little like that now. Bucky wasn’t telling a story, but he was making it feel normal and not something to pay attention to, the way he ran his hands down Steve’s arms, along his hands and fingers, then up to his jaw and down across his neck and shoulders, then very lightly from his waist down over his hips. It didn’t feel sexual but it did feel like something, like a little streak of color was zooming along those lines.

“What’s this?” Steve asked.

“Here’s what,” Bucky said. “Anyone who’s seen you fight knows you should be able to dance. You’re not clumsy. You’re seamless. There’s no reason to feel like you don’t know how to let go of everything and move.”

“Really,” Steve said.

“Yes,” Bucky said. “It’s fun, you know. I just want you to try it.”

“And it’s going to work out as well as all the other times you said that to me.”

Bucky laughed, pretty happy. “Come on, this is a really good song starting. Sam knows what he’s talking about.” Steve didn’t move and Bucky looked at him sternly. “Fine, okay. Just start with your arms, like this.” He started waving his arms around, which should have looked stupid, but instead it looked smart on him, like he was made of water. Steve flailed his arms around sarcastically. Bucky laughed. “Okay, okay.” He put his arms down and stood still except for his hips, which he swayed back and forth, with the rest of him slowly following. Again, he looked ridiculously dignified for someone doing something stupid, and he must have realized this, because he suddenly stepped about a yard back from Steve and did a backflip. When he landed on his feet he started dancing as bizarrely as possible, throwing out his arms one after the other, thrusting his hips, and using the soles of his sneakers to slide along the carpet instead of lifting up his feet. He shimmied around the room making ugly faces and said, “Okay, you have to admit you could at least do this.”

“Could, won’t,” Steve said. “I have my pride.” But he was feeling like he was pretty close to getting pulled into this; and he had a sense that, when he did break, it was going to be a nice feeling.

“No, you don’t have your pride,” Bucky said cheerfully and then, as another song started, he burst out laughing. “Oh, damn. We really shouldn’t be listening to this.”

“What? What’s wrong with it?” Steve had maybe heard the song in a store somewhere, but he didn’t know it well. Bucky was covering his mouth with his right hand, still laughing. 

“I can’t believe you don’t remember!”

“Remember what?” Steve didn’t have a bad memory, and they’d been living together for less than three months. He didn’t think they could have had a whole joke about a song that was barely familiar to him now. Meanwhile, Bucky was actually wiping the tears from his eyes because something about it had struck him as so funny. “Buck, I honestly barely know this song. Why are you laughing?” 

Bucky looked perplexed. “You really don’t know?”

“Yeah. I don’t know it.” 

Bucky shrugged; his mouth twisted a little. “I don’t actually know either,” he said. “There’s just something—I was hoping you could explain what it was.” It bothered Steve that Bucky would try to trick him instead of just admitting that he was confused. Then the chorus kicked in and Bucky keeled over and fell on the floor, where he lay completely motionless.

Was this part of a joke? Steve crouched down next to him and waved his fingers in front of Bucky’s face, which was completely unresponsive. He could be faking—in fact, maybe it was the kind of thing he’d think was funny, to pretend one of his triggers had been set off by a stupid song. But Steve didn’t think he was faking; he would have been smirking by now. Bucky just lay there with his muscles relaxed and his face completely blank. 

“Blink if you can hear me,” Steve said. Bucky didn’t blink. Steve faked like he was going to hit him in the eye; he still didn’t blink. “Sorry. _Can_ you blink, Buck?” After he watched Bucky for a minute, Steve could see that he was blinking, but just the way anyone would if they weren’t thinking about it. It was like Steve wasn’t even there; or like _Bucky_ wasn’t even there.

Was he not in his mind somehow?

As soon as the thought occurred to him, Steve knew that he couldn’t entertain it. He knew—well, he couldn’t know, but he had some idea of how much Bucky had been treated like an object. It was possible that this was a trigger that made Bucky unconscious of what was happening, sure; but it was also perfectly likely that he was conscious. So Steve was going to keep talking to him.

“So, we know why you shouldn’t listen to that song, huh?” he said. “It’s a trigger. I don’t know exactly what it does. You told me they could paralyze you—maybe that’s all it is.” _All_ it was. It was obvious Bucky had recognized the song as something to be avoided, but he hadn’t immediately remembered why. His brain had tried to slot it into something normal, something he and Steve shared, the same as it had with the obedience.

Steve found himself trying to catch Bucky’s eye, before realizing that was impossible. The eyes weren’t tracking. He’d better try to stay directly in front of Bucky’s face, where his eyes were focused.

“We talked about if you were blind and deaf,” he said, “but I guess we didn’t get around to talking about what you wanted me to do if you were paralyzed. I don’t—“ A different annoying song was starting and Steve got up and turned off the CD player. He’d been going to say _I don’t want you to be scared_ , but he immediately pictured how offended Bucky would get. _Something like me doesn’t get_ scared, _Steve_. “I don’t want you to be _bored_ ,” he finished, taking his place on the floor again, kneeling and leaning over Bucky. “You know—maybe you’d be more comfortable if you were upright.” He lugged Bucky over to the couch, where he lifted him and sat him down.

“I guess we could watch TV,” he suggested to Bucky and himself. But Bucky usually watched TV at Sam’s house because Steve didn’t have cable or DVR. Steve didn’t think they _could_ watch any of the shows Bucky liked on their TV.

Steve tried to think of an interesting story he could tell Bucky, but Bucky already knew most of Steve’s stories. “Thanks for trying to teach me to dance,” he said. “I hate it, but thanks.” It was sort of true, too, that it didn’t make sense for Steve to be unable to dance. Maybe it hadn’t made sense even before the serum. It was just that because he grew up with his body being such a disappointment, the idea of feeling certain things like music in it didn’t exactly make sense to him. His body wasn’t for him to have fun with; it was just an unfortunate storage facility for his mind. And later, it wasn’t for fun because it had a purpose.

He wasn’t sure why Bucky wanted so badly for him to be able to dance. “I wouldn’t be any fun to dance with even if I got really good at it,” he said, and filled in in his mind Bucky laughing— _really good is a long shot, pal_ —and then laughed at his own imagining of what Bucky would say. “I don’t really know why you ever wanted me to do it so much. It’s just—“

His mind filled in the thought of how he’d look dancing, even now, the way that he’d never really be able to just let go and _feel_ it. Suddenly he thought of Bucky rubbing his back, distracting him so he could enjoy it—and even the particulars of the way Bucky had come on to him, as terrible as the circumstances had been. _I’ll do everything for you. You don’t have to be nervous, okay? Relax._

Bucky was just so— _Bucky_. It would have pissed Steve off so badly coming from anyone else, but—

Would Steve have confronted Bucky about it if he could answer? It was a moot point; Bucky was still motionless on the couch, only sitting up because Steve had propped him with pillows. His gaze was blank. Steve made sure to lean into Bucky’s very restricted field of vision. “Hey Buck,” he said, “How about I dance for you?”

There wasn’t any response, but Steve went on. “You know,” he said, “a one man show. I know some moves from the USO show, even though I don’t know how to partner dance. See, I’m not _quite_ as benighted as you think I am.”

Steve positioned himself in the narrow corridor of space between the couch and the turned-off TV. He started singing a song that they both best knew in the version by Helen Kane. Bucky would have tried to do an imitation of Helen’s weird squeaky voice, and failed, and the failure would have been funny; Steve was pretending to have his pride, so instead he sang in as big and booming a voice as possible.

He tried to make the voice funny, and he was pretty sure it was; if Bucky had been faking his paralysis, this was the moment when he wouldn’t have been able to keep it going anymore. But he was unsmiling, as blank as a doll and almost featureless because of it. It was strange to realize how much of what Steve thought of as Bucky’s face included his expressions. Even the Soldier had had them, as changed as he’d been.

_Listen, big boy_

_Now that you got me made_

_Goodness but I’m afraid_

_Something’s gonna happen to you_

_Listen big boy_

_You gotta be hooked, and how_

_I would die if I should lose you now_

 

Steve shuffled sideways back and forth across the room in front of Bucky, wiggling his shoulders around and doing little hand motions. Then in the interest of following Bucky’s instructions, he started grabbing his hair with his hands and pulling it up into points. Bucky would just have to accept he wasn’t moving his hips—it was too hard to do that while he was also singing and shuffling around.

 

_Wear your flannel underwear_

_When you climb a tree!_

_Take good care of yourself_

_You belong to me!_

 

_When you sass a traffic cop_

_Use diplomacy!_

_Take good care of yourself_

_You belong to me!_

 

He couldn’t imagine a single person in the world who wouldn’t see this and think he was dangerously unstable. His dancing was bad enough, but he was doing it while his best friend was as limp as a dishrag. But Steve was pretty sure he knew what was going on—a trigger was a much more likely explanation than some kind of ordinary medical emergency.

Besides, he was sure there was nothing Bucky would hate more than to be paraded in front of doctors when he was like this. Steve thought that, given the chance, Bucky would never have wanted even Steve to know about the triggers. He had said they all had time limits, so Steve just had to wait and keep both of them from going crazy in the meantime.

He cycled through a few more songs before he realized that walking side to side was kind of stupid, since Bucky couldn’t track him. He was tired of it anyway. “That was a _little_ fun, jerk,” he admitted before going over to the bookcase and pulling out one of Bucky’s modern sci-fi books. “That Heinlein guy has too much sex in his books,” he fussed, since he thought Bucky would think that was funny. “Did they ever make you fight aliens? You never mentioned it. I bet you’d have liked it, if you could like things.”

He sat next to Bucky and opened to the bookmark. He read the book out loud for a while. It was weird. He didn’t think Bucky’s pulp magazines had been this weird when they were younger, at least not in the same way. He couldn’t help adding his own comments and questions to the things he was reading. “I hope it’s not too annoying. Well, at least women are allowed to talk in this book.”

He read for a long time before he realized that he hadn’t been timing how long Bucky had been paralyzed. What if his assessment of the situation was wrong? What if Bucky was having a medical problem and Steve was ignoring it?

“I’m gonna give this a few more hours, pal, okay?” he said. He felt like it had been more than an hour already, but who knew if the trigger was meant to last two hours or ten? He tried to tell himself that paralyzing Bucky for ten hours wouldn’t be practical for Hydra. It wouldn’t take them that long to do…whatever they were paralyzing him for.

“I’m losing my voice,” he told Bucky, which was true. “It should heal up soon, but I’m gonna turn on the TV for now.”

He leaned forward to pick up the remote, then turned on the TV and settled back on the couch with Bucky. He put the bookmark in the book and continued reading on to himself. It wasn’t his thing, but he should try to be up on the things Bucky was reading. Maybe he could ruin the ending for him. After a while it wasn’t so bad; he could get into the book easier now than he’d been able to when he was reading out loud. He could read faster and skim over the stupid parts.

He had finished the book and was about to go back and read the beginning when Bucky picked the remote up off Steve’s lap and turned off the TV. “Nice dancing,” he said.

Steve looked at him. Bucky was watching him with a faint, affectionate smile, mostly occupying his eyes.


	5. Discretion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: detailed recounting of rape

“So, aside from the dancing, how was I? You want me to do anything different next time?” Steve asked.

Bucky blinked at him. “Next time?” he said. “You’re playing on playing that song for me again?”

“Well, no,” Steve said, “but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Can you honestly say you don’t have any other triggers that might paralyze you?”

“I guess not,” Bucky said long sufferingly. “But it doesn’t really matter what you do. I’m fine, aren’t I?”

“I guess,” Steve said. Bucky didn’t look upset or anything. As Steve was watching him Bucky did a series of weird movements, half shaking and half dancing, like he was working out a crick in his whole body. He snapped his head to the side, wiggled his fingers, rolled his shoulders. On him it did look as good as dancing. “Is it okay that I put you on the couch? Did you want me to put you in bed or something?”

Bucky went stiff in the middle of his little exercise routine. His eyes, which had been squeezed shut as he scrunched up his face in different expressions, opened and looked at Steve. “Uh. Don’t lay me down,” he said in a surprisingly serious voice.

“Oh,” Steve said.

Bucky got a little smile. “You want to ask why?”

“I,” Steve said. “Yeah? If you don’t mind saying.”

“Well,” Bucky said, stretching luxuriously, “I have to pee.”

“What?” Steve said.

“I’m an assassin, not a camel,” Bucky said, and he hopped up and walked off to the bathroom, occasionally pausing to shake an arm or a leg out. He disappeared out of sight; there was a pause; and then Steve heard him call from the bathroom, “Hey, Steve!”

Steve jumped up and ran to the bathroom. “What?” He shielded his eyes with his hand, because Bucky already had his dick out over the toilet.

“Aw, that’s real cute,” Bucky said. He started pissing.

“Are you okay? What’s the matter?”

“Nothing?” Bucky said, still pissing. He turned his head to look at Steve, who was watching him between his fingers like he was a horror movie. “What’s the matter with you?” He shook his dick off and then shook it in Steve’s direction. “Here it is, the Loch Ness Monster. What do you think? Can you tell it’s been through the shredder?”

“No,” Steve said. “It looks the same as it did before.”

“Oh, so you were looking!” Bucky crowed.

“It’s—it’s normal to look,” Steve said. “Everyone does that sometimes. We were roommates.”

“But here you are covering your face up like you’re getting married,” Bucky said, buttoning his jeans up and going to wash his hands. At least he washed his hands, even though Steve thought he didn’t brush his teeth or shower enough. “It’s not good enough for you now that you know what it’s been through. Can’t even look at it. Makes your dick shrivel up like a slug to even think about it, right?”

He didn’t sound angry, like he would have saying the same words a few weeks ago. He said it all gently, just filling up space. So it was easy for Steve to say: “Hey, if my dick was a slug it would be a huge, manly slug. Wouldn’t shrivel up for anything.”

Bucky snorted. “They used to move me around,” he said seamlessly, “pose me for Polaroids sometimes, when I was frozen and laid out on the table.” He ambled out of the bathroom and up the hall to the kitchen; Steve followed him and leaned against the cupboards while Bucky rummaged around in the refrigerator and then the pantry. He didn’t seem satisfied with anything until he found a bag of chips, which he read the back of carefully before he ripped it open and started talking again. “Really dumb of them, big security risk, but…well, especially before the Internet, maybe not such a risk. There was no soft copy. They were probably just passing the pictures around at work parties.”

“Pictures of what exactly?” Steve said.

Bucky waved his hand around dismissively. “You know, they’d put funny hats on me, Groucho Marx glasses—”

“ _Really_?”

Steve wasn’t able to keep the surprise out of his voice. Bucky stared at him. “ _That_ ’s the hardest part to believe?” he said.

“You know,” Steve said, thinking about it, “It kind of is. It’s so dumb.” Bucky stuffed a handful of chips in his mouth. “I don’t know, they had you paralyzed, this legendary assassin—I would have thought they’d at least do a more elaborate costume.”

“Ha,” Bucky said. “Well, some of the girls—and there were girls, eventually, progress marches on—would do my makeup. What do you think of that?”

“I bet you looked great,” Steve said.

“Oh me fucking too, if I just had the muscle control to look at myself in the mirror,” Bucky said. “I don’t know why it bothered me, when you think about—” He pulled an inscrutable comedic face. “Well, when you think about it, me being bothered by _anything_ is just stupid. I had _no_ control.” He laughed softly. “I guess it didn’t bother me, at the time, being moved around. I almost liked it. But I, well.” He shrugged and rolled his eyes and shuffled around where he was standing, like he was doing a little comedy routine about how stupid everything was. “I didn’t like when you moved me—felt too much like the same thing—don’t know why I would care—sorry for complaining—but you asked!” He said this all in a rush and glared at Steve.

“Got it,” Steve said. “I won’t move you if you get paralyzed again.”

“It probably _will_ happen again,” Bucky said. “You’re right.” He leaned back against the wall and sighed, shoveling chips into his mouth. “I don’t even get to know that I’m going to be able to move my own body. Why should I? Where’s the fun in that?”

“It might be a little fun,” Steve said.

“You’re a real barrel of laughs,” Bucky said.

“Sorry about that,” Steve said. “I know I’m not very funny. Thing is, when I was growing up, this really unfunny kid was always around, no sense of humor, no sense of timing—practically all his jokes were puns.” Bucky shoved him gently and Steve pretended to reel back a tiny bit. “With that influence, I just didn’t stand a chance.”

“Puns are back in now,” Bucky said.

“No they’re not.”

Bucky sighed. “I mean, in the event of a flash flood or lightning is striking the house, I’ll put up with you moving me—because I want to spare you the pain of losing me. But otherwise it would be nice to be left to my own devices. Predictable as they’re gonna be with me being paralyzed.”

“I got it,” Steve said. “I wouldn’t move you.”

“Oh, you’re going to do what I say?” Bucky said. “Whatever I ask you to do with me, you’re going to do?” There was a vaguely sarcastic lilt to his voice.

“I know,” Steve said. “Unbelievable. It’s like something out of Heinlein, huh?”

Bucky snorted and Steve felt proud of himself. He downed the last of his bag of chips and walked over to throw it away, then started pacing in the small space of the kitchen. “Don’t know why they wanted to waste their time that way,” he said. “They were just supposed to put me away or—well, if they felt like making themselves useful, maybe put a feeding tube in me and wash me? They were mostly scared to touch me when I was moving so they usually had to just hose me, which isn’t all that thorough—they should’ve been washing behind my ears and shit, but instead they said, ‘Wow, let’s put lipstick on him!’

“They, uh, they used a hose on you?” Steve said.

“Really cold,” Bucky said—“I mean, not that it bothered me, I was used to being cold, right?” He laughed. “Anyway, the makeup stuff, those pictures, the sex stuff—it was really bad practice, because I’d actually start to come back a little bit during it. ‘Cause you don’t put lipstick on a gun or whatever—that’s why they weren’t supposed to do it, ‘cause treating me like a person, even as a joke, tended to mess with the programming. You don’t put your dick in the barrel of a gun and use it to jerk off either, so, uh—” He shrugged. “Just weird memories, in a way, ‘cause they feel a little different from some of the other memories. What?”

“Nothing,” Steve said. He swallowed, put his hand out to steady himself on the kitchen counter; then, wanting to hide his reaction, he awkwardly walked over to the refrigerator like he was just fidgeting for some reason. He walked back.

Bucky blinked at him. “What?”

“What sex stuff?” Steve said.

“You know, just what I said,” Bucky said. “I had some holes in me, I couldn’t move, so—you know how people are.”

Steve felt that maybe he didn’t know how people were.

“I told you about that,” Bucky said.

“No, you didn’t,” Steve said. “You straight up said there wasn’t, remember?”

He was afraid a note of hysteria crept into his voice, and his fears were confirmed when Bucky shrank back from him a little bit. There was a time when he wouldn’t have noticed, but he saw it now, and he saw when Bucky recognized what he himself was doing, and that Steve had seen it. He squared his shoulders. “I didn’t have to tell you anything!” he said. “You made it obvious you wouldn’t want to fuck something that wasn’t _the real Bucky_ , that didn’t know how to say no—I had to tell you that nothing had happened!”

“Jesus, Buck,” Steve said.

“I’m sorry, okay?” Bucky said. “For heaven’s sake.” He went over to the couch and sat down with his head between his knees. Steve went over and hovered in front of him, a few feet away. Bucky just stayed like that, with his head down. He looked like such a lump that it should have been funny.

“Can I sit next to you?” Steve said.

Without raising his head, Bucky put his hand out and patted the space next to him. Steve sat down. Bucky sat up, slowly, and smiled at him. “It’s just,” he said, grinning, “no regular person would—understand, no regular person would want to, you know?” He shrugged. “If they knew what I—if they knew that I—“

“Oh, come on,” Steve said. He was surprised by the sharpness of his own voice. “Of course you have unique circumstances but—back when you— _wanted_ things, would you have not been interested in a girl because something happened to her? Or a guy, I mean, if something happened to him?”

Bucky blinked at him, and smiled more gently, like Steve was an unusual frog. He shook his head. “It’s different,” he said. “It’s not that it happened. There’s an extra part that you can’t understand.” Steve snorted. Bucky jerked his head sideways to stare at him. “ _What_?”

“Well, you didn’t even tell me about it, so how do you know if I can understand it or not? You just _know_ ,” Steve said, drawing the word out. “You just _know_ without _me_ even knowing what it is.”

Bucky sighed at him, irritated. “Okay, fine. I wanted it to happen. I liked it, I begged for him to do it—“

“So it happened more than you said?” Steve said. “It happened when you weren’t paralyzed?”

“No, I was paralyzed. Stop interrupting,” Bucky said.

“Uh, Buck, I hate to break it to you, but when you’re paralyzed you can’t talk. Did you ask him _before_ to do something _later_ when you were paralyzed?” Steve was trying to figure out exactly what kind of relationship Bucky had with this guy, that he even had the opportunity to ask in advance. He’d figured the paralysis probably always had come as a surprise.

“No, I didn’t _ask him before_ ,” Bucky said contemptuously. Steve raised his eyebrows at him. “I didn’t even know who he was! It’s not like I could focus my eyes to look at him. I’m pretty sure it was one guy three or four times but it could have been three or four guys who all had the idea independent of each other.”

“The idea—“

“Well, you know, that I was just lying there and I couldn’t stop them and I couldn’t bite down on their dicks or anything,” Bucky said. “I mean, usually if you stick your dick in some crazy assassin’s mouth—well, wouldn’t that be an obvious thing you’d worry about? These aren’t even the original teeth—they’re not human bones. I bite down on your dick, it’s coming off, for sure.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Steve said.

“Point is,” Bucky said, “okay, to be completely factual about it, I wasn’t asking in the sense of asking him out loud. I was begging him for it in my head. Practically praying for it every time I got paralyzed since the first time he did it.”

“I see,” Steve said.

Bucky looked at him. Steve had nothing more to say. “Well,” Bucky said, “don’t you want to know what he did?”

“Sure,” Steve said. It wouldn’t really be worse than it having happened in the first place.

“Well, he used my head as a high quality Fleshlight. But you probably don’t know what that is.”

“Oh, come on,” Steve said. He was a virgin, not a saint. “I have about ten Fleshlights.”

“You do not,” Bucky said.

“Yeah, I do,” Steve said. Bucky looked at him consideringly. “Okay, fine, I only have one. But I have one.”

“I guess I should start at the beginning,” Bucky said. “First he tried to stick his dick in my ass. What a brain trust! Obviously I couldn’t relax my muscles because I was paralyzed. But he still tries cramming it in there. I think he hurt himself more than me, trying that. So then he tries my mouth—that’s a lot better, ‘cause”—he rubbed his neck, watching Steve intently—“my throat was relaxed when they played the trigger. Slid in like a knife through butter.” Bucky cupped his hands like they were cradling something invisible, and shook them, like he was shaking a jar of change. “He starts gripping my head, jackhammering into me like he’s a fucking pneumatic drill. It’s over in about five seconds. And then”—Bucky laughed, a pure, happy laugh—“that’s when the trouble started. ‘Cause I couldn’t swallow, and I got no gag reflex—they got rid of that pretty early on—and the throat started choking. My eyes were stuck wide open, you know, so I’m watching this guy’s face go from _aw, yeah, I just got the first blowjob of my life_ to _aw, nuts, I just killed the Winter Soldier_!”

Bucky did the two expressions so effortlessly—the tech’s dumb looking postcoital bliss, and the equally dumb looking hapless panic—that Steve laughed out loud. Bucky blinked at him and then smiled, kind of shyly.

“So he flips me right over on my stomach—or he _tries_ to, anyway—thinking it’ll all fall out of my mouth. But this guy—top of his class at Hydra University, I’m sure—is so panicked that I just kind of—well, he gets me on my stomach, in the end, but in the process he knocks me off the table and onto the floor. I’m not choking anymore, but he broke my nose, and the thing is—“

“We’re kind of big guys,” Steve said. “And your arm’s got to be pretty heavy.”

“Exactly. Poor guy couldn’t lay me back up on the table again. It’s this whole _business_ —he fucking _finally_ gets me up in a sitting position, tries to lean me up against the leg of the table—but it doesn’t hold me up. I just go—“ Bucky wiggled his arms and mimed falling back over, softly, onto his side. “Ker-plunk.” He stayed lying down a minute, just to milk all the comedy out of the gesture, and then sat back up. “Oh, and just so you get the picture, this guy was from Jersey.”

“Yeah, I figured,” Steve said.

Bucky beamed. “You got my back here. Whole time guy’s going in this thick Jersey accent so a civilized person can barely understand him, ‘Oh shit, oh shit, _oh_ shit, oh _shit_.’ Dragging me this way and that. _Might_ have at least gotten me sitting up, for all he’d have been able to explain that, but his hands are shaking so bad he can’t even get me propped up. So then this other, _marginally_ more intelligent tech comes in, ‘cause she heard my arm banging on the floor every time he dropped me.”

“I thought you just made a ‘ker-plunk’ noise,” Steve said.

“Don’t be a wet blanket.”

“And this smarter tech, this girl— _she_ was from Brooklyn, I’m guessing.”

“Well, now that you mention it, she sure was,” Bucky said. “Nice to hear someone speaking English again, you know? I almost cried with relief. Not that I could cry, mind you. Girl says, ‘What the fuck’s going on here, Buster Brown?’”

That was too much. Steve, who didn’t usually go all out with his emotional expressions, actually slapped his knee. He curled up around himself, wheezing. Bucky grinned.

“She says, ‘Hey, Buster Brown—” Bucky paused for Steve to get through his second gale of laughter. “’Hey, bozo—how come this fine specimen of assassinanity’s lying naked on the floor with his nose gushing like the fountain at Grand Army Plaza?”

“She did not say that.”

“Hey, pal, I was there!” Bucky yelled happily, jabbing his pointer finger at Steve. “She said exactly that. She said, ‘Hey, Mr. Cookie Crumble—‘“ At this point they were both shaking with laughter, and Bucky had to take a moment to collect himself. “She says, ‘How come his nose is broken?’ And the first tech goes, the Jersey asshole goes, ‘Oh, I just knocked him off the table when I was stripping him to wash him up.’ He’s got a washcloth handy and he’s brandishing it at her—‘See? See?’ Nothing untoward going on, he says. So she helps him pick me up—strong girl, of course, knows how to do a seat carry, easy. They get me on the table and she’s helping him wash me up. He gets in front of me and wipes his gunk off my face, which is hard to tell what it is, anyway, at this point. He goes on and on about how he can’t believe he knocked me off the table, and the girl’s going, ‘Yeah, mm-hmm.’ Then—“

Bucky paused to make sure Steve was paying utmost attention. “Yeah, okay,” Steve said. “Then what?”

“She goes, ‘So you want to tell me how come his asshole’s bleeding?’”

“Oh, boy,” Steve said.

“There’s a long pause. I practically hear the sweat dripping off him like I didn’t get enough of his bodily fluids on me in one day. And then she says, ‘You share that mary jane you got hidden in your work locker, and we won’t hear any more about it.’ And _that_ ,” Bucky said with a flourish, “that’s Fleshlight Story Number One. Number two and number—whatever, three or four—he took care to pull out! What do you think of _that_?”

As strange as it all was in theory, Steve savored the way Bucky lolled back, his elbows hooked over the back of the couch, looking friendly and pleased with himself. Bucky had asked him the same question so many times— _What do you think of that?_ —sometimes nervous, usually angry, like he was spitting it in Steve’s face. Now he didn’t even look worried. It was a rhetorical question, these days.

“You’re a riot,” Steve said. Bucky smiled, and Steve probably unwisely continued, “But did it really happen that way?”

Bucky rolled his eyes. “Of course it did,” he said in a tone that brooked some argument.

“You said you were going to tell me why you liked it,” Steve said. “Said I couldn’t possibly understand. You mean you liked it as a comedy?”

Bucky closed his eyes for a minute, then opened them again. When he did his face was serious; then his mouth quirked with distaste or maybe concentration. “Your friend,” he said quietly. “It’d’ve been different, for someone like that. For a person.” He gave Steve a challenging look.

“How so?” Steve asked.

“Because,” Bucky said, “a person has—friends, sweethearts, family, and even—a person at least shakes hands, if they don’t have any of that. A person gets, uh—“ Bucky’s eyes fixed on Steve, maybe waiting for him to finish the sentence; when Steve didn’t say anything he said, “A person gets touched.”

Steve felt like his face was frozen. He urged himself to smile, blink, anything, before Bucky noticed.

“Ever since I came into being, nobody ever touched me for no reason. Once they broke him, they hardly ever needed to punish me, and it was a waste of resources to do anything like beat me. They didn’t want to damage the body. They’d, uh—“ Bucky’s eyes were unfocused, like he didn’t know where to look while he was talking about this. “I guess you know they’d have to drag me around when I first came out of cryo, hold me up by the arms. They’d let me lean on them, put their hands on my face when they opened my mouth up for the mouthguard, and—I wasn’t fighting, like he would have. I, well…” He shrugged. “It was the only time anyone touched me. And then _this_ guy, the tech—he reached, up, he—”Bucky made the gesture he’d made before, like he was holding a jar of change in two hands. “I’m not stupid, I knew he was just holding my jaw to get at the back of my throat. But he—his thumbs were on my jaw, and it felt like he was stroking my _face_ , kind of—and his fingers were touching my hair—”

Bucky looked right at Steve, then, and Steve wasn’t prepared for it. Bucky had looked at him just to see if he was following, but whatever he saw in Steve’s face made him flinch. It was like a shade went down over his eyes. Steve tried to react quickly to stop this from happening; he struggled to speak, but he couldn’t come up with any words.

He opened and closed his mouth, watching Bucky get angry, and Steve didn’t—he _couldn’t_ —say anything. Bucky jumped to his feet. “You stupid shit,” he said. “I knew it! I knew you wouldn’t understand! I knew you’d be disgusted, you’ve always been _such a great person_ , so pure—you’d _never_ feel like that, would you? You’d never be as disgusting and pathetic as I was, _fine_ , but you didn’t need to spend so much time tricking me into thinking I could tell you the truth.”

He turned and made for the door, and then Steve did react. He was in front of the door when Bucky got to it, and then he thought, shit, maybe he shouldn’t be blocking Bucky from getting away. But it wasn’t like he could actually keep Bucky in the apartment if he wanted to leave.

Bucky blinked at him, irritated; he’d been moving at more of a normal human speed. He hadn’t expected Steve to try to stop him from leaving.

“You can’t—“ Steve said, and then realized he still didn’t know how to put the words together. “It’s not fair if you—“

“What,” Bucky said.

“I didn’t mean—I wasn’t thinking anything bad about you.”

“What were you thinking then?” Bucky said, leaning nonchalantly against the door as if he hadn’t been furious less than a minute ago.

“It’s,” Steve said, and then he didn’t know how to go on without making Bucky angry. He would have been angry if someone said this to him. “It’s just—the reason I was looking at you like that was because I _do_ understand.” Bucky raised his eyebrows. “Not like I’ve been in that exact situation, but I don’t think it’s strange for you to like someone touching you, even though it was like that.”

“Steve,” Bucky said, “you can’t honestly pretend everyone likes having some lunatic grab them by the ears and stuff his cheesy dick down their throat and then almost choke them with come and knock them off a table and break their nose.”

“You don’t know,” Steve said. “They’ve never done a national poll on that.” Bucky cracked a smile. Heartened, Steve said, “Look, I know it sounds ridiculous because I thought it did, too, but Sam told me it’s just a normal physical need, like eating or sleeping. People need to be touched or they go kind of crazy. _I_ felt a little crazy about it when I first woke up.” Bucky squinted at him. “Yeah, I know, it’s different. I was still shaking hands with people—it was nothing as bad as it was for you, and besides, you’re nothing _like_ me. You always lived in everybody’s back pocket.”

“That wasn’t me,” Bucky said perfunctorily.

“Okay, they _made you out of a guy_ who lived in everybody’s back pocket—is that how you want me to say it? They made you out of someone like that, and then they didn’t even touch you to punish you. They treated you like a machine. It sounds like—well, I know they _really_ tortured you, cut you up and stuff, but what you’re describing is—“

“You’re not going to call _that_ torture, are you?” Bucky said. “It’d be a little prissy for me to get upset about it—I mean, you can’t really blame people for not wanting to touch me, can you? It’s kind of the natural order of things.”

“Nothing about that’s _natural_ ,” Steve burst out. Bucky glared at him. “Buck, I mean nothing _they_ did is natural. It’s natural that you were lonely. That makes sense.”

“I wasn’t lonely,” Bucky said. “Only people get lonely. Things don’t get lonely.”

“What were you, then,” Steve said, “if you weren’t lonely?”

“Hm,” Bucky said. “Maybe I was like—well, doesn’t a piano go out of tune, if no one plays it?”

“I think it’s more time, and the weather,” Steve said.

Bucky rolled his eyes. “Well, fine,” he said—“if you’re going to split hairs, I guess you could say I was lonely. But there’s no one you can blame for that, right? I mean, what kind of sick fuck would want to touch someone like me? Of course they didn’t. They might have done some bad things, but—“

“But that was _too_ bad,” Steve said, “even for them?” He reached out and put his hand on Bucky’s right elbow. Bucky got very still. He was wearing a long sleeved shirt. Steve rolled up Bucky’s sleeve with his other hand and laid his hand on the skin of Bucky’s forearm, watching him carefully. Bucky winced.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said.

“Buck,” Steve said. “You’re just—” Bucky had been touching him normally. He’d gotten more physical with Steve when he was coming on to him, less when he was angry at him; but overall, he’d been just about as hands on as the guy Steve remembered. Steve would never have suspected that being touched was such a big deal for him.

“I’m just what?” Bucky said; and Steve knew, of course, that Bucky wouldn’t have wanted him to know, would have been ashamed of it.

“Do you want a back rub?”

“ _What_?” Bucky said.

Steve took his hand off of Bucky’s arm, and Bucky immediately pulled his sleeve up. “If you,” Steve said, and then stopped, because he was embarrassed. He swallowed. “If you ever want anybody to touch you, I—I’d be happy to do whatever you want. Nothing funny, I won’t try anything on you, just—whatever you want.” It was a little crazy how much he wanted Bucky to say yes—he was hungry for it, if there was something he could do for Bucky that Bucky would enjoy. It shocked him how much he wanted it.

“A back rub,” Bucky said. He squinted, biting his lip.

“Whatever you want,” Steve said. “I could—touch your hair, or your face—”

Bucky looked at Steve like he was speaking Sanskrit—well, assuming Bucky didn’t speak Sanskrit. “Why would you do that?” he asked.

“Well, I mean,” Steve hedged, “is that—would you like that?”

“Well, sure,” Bucky said, “but I don’t have anything to give you back for it. You don’t want me. We’ve been over and over that.”

Steve didn’t want to get bogged down arguing through the subtleties of what he wanted. “You used to give me back rubs,” he said, “and you didn’t ask for anything.”

“That’s different,” Bucky said, but he looked a little taken aback. He leaned back on the door like he was trying to look casual.

“I don’t see how it’s different.”

Bucky sighed. “It just is.”

“How is it different?” Steve said, and if he hadn’t been put in mind of those specific memories he might have backed down from the way Bucky was blinking and wrinkling his nose at him and overall making Steve feel like he was proposing something not just stupid, but utterly incomprehensible.

Because he remembered—that was how he’d felt, a little. It wasn’t the same, but it was a reaction he could come up on making sense of. Then Bucky said, again, “You don’t have to give me anything. You don’t owe me,” and Steve knew for sure that he understood.

“Just—quit arguing,” he said. Bucky rolled his eyes again. “Sit down on the floor with me,” Steve said, and the two of them sat on the carpet, just inside the door of their apartment. Bucky was curled up like a big pretzel, his elbows sticking out with uncharacteristic awkwardness, his knees up.

“Well?” he said, like he was saying _do your worst_.

He was staring at Steve, hardly blinking. “Just—close your eyes,” Steve said, and Bucky did immediately. He ducked his head forward slightly, hiding his face in his knees. Steve put his right hand out and settled it on Bucky’s temple, his fingers pushing into Bucky’s hair. Bucky didn’t move. Steve didn’t really know what he was doing, so he turned his hand sideways and rubbed the side of his knuckles along the soft, short part of Bucky’s hair. It was like stroking a rabbit’s foot for good luck. He kept on for a minute, closing his eyes too and just feeling the softness.

He put his left hand out and touched the exposed parts of Bucky’s face, running his fingertips across Bucky’s forehead, down the right side of his face, along his jaw. Bucky didn’t react at all; he didn’t move towards or away from Steve’s hand, even infinitesimally.

“Bucky?” Steve said. When Bucky didn’t answer a chill shot through him—could something have gotten triggered _again_? He started to pull his left hand back.

Bucky’s hand shot up, grabbed Steve’s wrist, and moved Steve’s hand back onto his face. His expression was still hidden in his knees, although Steve thought he had his eyes squeezed shut very tight. Bucky arranged Steve’s hand so his palm was flat, flush against the side of Bucky’s face, and then let go of him again. Experimentally, Steve moved his right hand to the other side of Bucky’s face. This must have been pretty much how the tech had held Bucky when he took advantage of him.

They sat like that for a minute; Steve didn’t know what he was expecting. He heard Bucky draw in a thick, reedy breath. He stroked his fingers up into Bucky’s hair a little more, and he heard Bucky talking, softly, into his knees.

“Sorry,” he was saying. “I—I can’t.”

Steve paused. “You want me to stop?” Bucky shook his head minutely. “Okay.”

“I’m so sorry,” Bucky said. “I know it’s disgusting. I’m sorry I tricked you into doing this.”

Steve lurched forward and hugged him, pushing his face into Bucky’s neck. It was unwieldy with Bucky all curled up in a ball, but Steve did his best, and Bucky melted against him, which felt wonderful. “Come on,” Steve said. “I want this. I’m not the one with the problem knowing what I want.”

Bucky snorted. “Don’t be an asshole,” he said.

Steve squeezed him. “You want me to stop?” he said.

“I want you to stop asking me stupid questions.”

So Steve stopped talking, and he almost stopped thinking. He just did what made sense. He leaned forward and pressed his nose into Bucky’s neck, inhaling, and Bucky laid his metal arm gingerly over Steve’s back. Steve picked his head up a little, rubbing their faces together. He felt Bucky shifting himself around, putting his knees down so Steve could scramble forward and hold him closer.

Steve kept squeezing his eyes shut, like Bucky had before; he understood now why Bucky had done it. It was overwhelming, being so close to someone, and—by this point he could feel that Bucky liked it, the way he was wrapping around Steve, relaxing more and, occasionally, sighing so quietly that Steve wouldn’t have been able to hear him if his ear hadn’t been so close to Bucky’s mouth. His arms weren’t quite as tight around Steve as Steve would have liked, so he grabbed them and pulled them tighter, and he was rewarded with a very audible, surprised intake of breath.

Bucky tightened his hold. If he was honest, Steve knew he’d really wanted the metal arm especially. The feel of it squeezing him felt like nothing so much as the metal safety bars that clamped down over you on a rollercoaster—protection, certainty, wonder. Bucky was really here, Bucky really wanted something that Steve could give him, he was _enjoying it_ —

If Steve had been thinking he wouldn’t have done it, but he wasn’t thinking. He drew his face back and kissed Bucky on the forehead, and when Bucky shivered at that he kissed him more: on the cheek, behind his ear, and then, lower, on the side and the curve of his neck.

Bucky made a series of funny, choked sounding noises and Steve pulled back with his eyes open to make sure he wasn’t crying or something. But he was laughing.

“What is it?” Steve said.

“You’re getting hard, is what,” Bucky said.

“I am not,” Steve said, and then realized, horrified, that he was. He scooted away from Bucky on the floor, feeling like he’d been dunked in a bucket of ice water. “I’m so sorry, Buck, I didn’t know—“

“Steve, it’s—“

“You must—I swear, I’m not making this up. I got distracted. I didn’t know that would happen. God, you must think I’m just like that guy—“

“Steve,” Bucky said. He didn’t look upset. He put his hand on Steve’s shoulder. “Steve, pal—can you say that again? I was too surprised to laugh the first time.”

“It’s not funny,” Steve said. “You trusted me, and I was getting off on it, by accident, when I just wanted to make you feel good—“

Bucky took his hand back so he could cover his mouth while he shook with laughter. Steve watched him in a state of shock. Bucky was a wreck, sure, but Steve didn’t think he was crazy. It wasn’t even an angry, barked laugh—he looked _happy_.

“Steve Rogers,” he said.

“ _What_?” Steve said at the end of his rope.

Bucky cackled. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just—well, the more time I spend with you the more I see I can always count on you to be Steve Rogers.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Steve said.

Bucky looked at him, chewing on his lip, and Steve wished he’d get the horrible thing over with. He had a very gentle look in his eyes, kind of over-careful. “Steve,” he said, “how many people do you think would get off on doing that for me?”

Steve didn’t understand the question.

“I’m not mad,” Bucky said. “I like that you like it.” He shook his head slowly. “You really do like it, don’t you?”

“I didn’t mean to,” Steve said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Bucky said. He really didn’t seem anything but happy, and he had his eyes fixed on Steve in a funny way, like he was trying to put together a puzzle. “So, Steve, here’s the thing: would you let me kiss you back? Would you let me touch _your_ hair, too? Would you let me touch your dick? Would you like that?”

Pleasure surged up in him freakishly at each image—it was difficult, already, sitting a full arm’s length away from Bucky, not touching him. Steve said, with not as much conviction as he should have, “It wouldn’t be right, Buck, because it wouldn’t be equal—because you can’t enjoy it. Because I can’t pay you back in kind.”

There was a silence; Bucky looked at Steve brightly, until the last sentence of what he’d said sank in.

“Oh,” he said. “I mean—”

“Look,” Bucky said, “thing is, it turns out I think I _would_ enjoy it. Believe me, I’m as surprised as you are.” He splayed his fingers out, like he was waking them back up after they’d gone numb. It was a significantly stranger looking gesture on his left hand. “There might be eight inches of me that won’t like it, but my hands and my mouth and my brain—well, I guess there’s no reason _they_ couldn’t like it. What do you think of that?”

Steve considered it. “I can believe it,” he said, “except for the part about the eight inches.”

“I left myself wide open for that, huh,” Bucky said.

“Well, I’m just saying,” Steve said. “If it’s not part of you, size doesn’t matter, right?”

“You just want to stomp on the maybe three remaining shreds of my dignity,” Bucky said.

“If you say so,” Steve said.

Bucky went quiet again, just gazing at him with the soft, amused look he’d been turning on Steve more and more. “You didn’t answer my question,” he said.

“What’s your question? I forgot it in the heat of the moment and your bald faced lie about the size of your dick.”

“Steve,” Bucky said. A smile played at the corners of his mouth. He put his hands on Steve’s shoulders—he held him at arm’s length, still. “Can I kiss you for real?”

“I,” Steve said. He was—distressed? Dysregulated? Distracted?—by the peculiar grip Bucky had on him. He could feel how strong Bucky’s hands were—one almost as strong as his, one much stronger—and he knew from experience how hard it could be to grip with hands like that, not to crush what you were holding. Bucky’s hands were an almost unbelievably equal combination of firm and gentle.

He was being so careful. Steve knew Bucky’d always been careful with him, but—in a certain way, in a way that—even back when everyone had been careful with Steve, Bucky had been different. His carefulness had been peculiar, because it was particular to Steve, not to an idea of Steve.

Steve reached out and ran his hand, very gently, over the side of Bucky’s face. Bucky grinned, shut his eyes, turned his face away. Steve brought his hand back to his side. Bucky looked at him, waiting.

“Yeah,” Steve said. “You can, if you want to.”

“Of course I want to, you drip,” Bucky said, and he pulled Steve over to kiss him.

His mouth was like his hands. In a minute Steve had—well, he wouldn’t have believed he’d do it if he hadn’t done it, but he’d grabbed Bucky and pulled him over, and now Steve was lying on the floor and Bucky was on top of him, warm and lively and laughing. Steve wasn’t really holding onto him; he was running his hands up and down Bucky’s spine, stroking the back of his neck, pushing his fingers into his hair. He felt the touches Bucky especially liked reflected back at him in little hitches of breath and pleased shivers in between kisses.

“Bucky,” he breathed, not having any better way to express himself, and Bucky pulled back and leaned over him, laughing at him. There was a quiet, soft, flickering look in his eyes, and as soon as he pulled back he put his left hand in Steve’s hair, like he couldn’t keep from touching him for a second—like he—like—“ _Bucky_ ,” Steve said again, helpless.

“You like that?” Bucky asked, and when Steve nodded he said, wonderingly, “You like me. You really like me, don’t you?”

“I do,” Steve said, and in case Bucky might think he was confused about who he meant, he took Bucky’s metal hand and brought it to his mouth and kissed it.

Bucky’s eyes about bugged out of his head. “Steve Rogers,” he said, beaming. “Steve fucking Rogers. _You like me_.”

Steve laughed, thinking something about how they seemed to be able to say only a few sentences between them, and half of them were the other person’s name.

“Well, now we got that squared away,” Bucky said, “I have a few more questions.” He put his hand under Steve’s shirt, running it down his side and up again. Steve choked. “Do you like that?”

“You’re such an asshole,” Steve said.

“I’ll take it. Okay. What about this?” Steve didn’t even want to think about what Bucky was doing under there. Bucky grinned at him. “Well?”

“What do you think?” Steve said.

“You’re not very forthcoming,” Bucky said. He hooked one finger in the waistband of Steve’s jeans and Steve horribly—well, not _too_ horribly, actually, maybe not horribly at all—pushed up towards him. “Oh, you like that? Well, what about this, then? And this? And—come on, Steve, we gotta make sure you’re _enjoying_ it, right? What about _this_?”


End file.
